Most of us like to think of the major decisions of government and military being carried out by giants and ogres--terrifying creatures who either navigate the national waters with superhuman accuracy or wander the landscape killing indiscriminately and entirely out of malice. It's somehow more comforting to create gods out of them than to accept them as they are: schmucks like the rest of us who act upon insufficient information, gut instinct, and unspoken personal agendas of which even they are unaware. It's this disquieting fact that concerns Errol Morris' The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, which, through conversations with Robert S. McNamara, shows the process by which one individual can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and accept it as part of the job--with or without regrets.

Morris uses his subject to examine the human fragility at the centre of some of America's worst international disasters. McNamara explains how believing one of two contradictory messages from Russia determined the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis--the frantic message of compromise from Khrushchev that was trusted and a hardliner stance from some of his underlings that might have resulted in nuclear war. (The "lesson" learned in this instance? "Empathize with your enemy.") Jumping back in time, he explains his role in the firebombing of Tokyo under the brutal General Curtis LeMay, of which he brazenly admits to behaving "as war criminals" and ponders whether it was worth the immolation of 100,000 civilians to achieve American objectives. It's true, he freely admits to making mistakes. But the question remains--is he allowed to?

And so the film goes on, illustrating McNamara's words with the counterpoint of archival footage and the occasional stylistic curlicue from Morris' bag of tricks. The debacle of Vietnam is explained as a combination of botched intelligence and ignorance of the enemy--not only did that torpedo in the Gulf of Tonkin never exist, but the "domino theory" itself was based on the assumption that Vietnam and Red China were sisters under the skin when, in fact, they hated each other. The consequences of these misunderstandings are chilling when visually phrased by Morris: one sees soldiers toting massive bombs and realizes they're nonchalantly escorting instruments of death just as the Secretary of Defense moved them in that direction. After a while, we're amazed at the smallness of this man in comparison to the consequences of his actions and horrified to think that he learned his lessons too late, if in fact he has learned anything beyond his own fallibility in the face of unforeseen circumstances.

There are problems with The Fog of War. Morris' pictures can be a trifle obvious, as when he illustrates the domino theory by placing a line of dominoes on a map of Vietnam; his use of Philip Glass is also a mistake, as the composer turns in a score that may as well have been written by a computer. And the film is a touch credulous to a subject who can't understand how Vietnam could be seen as a colonial war, or remember if he authorized the use of Agent Orange--the film's politics are vague and undecided. But if the film is more experiential than political, that experience is one that never makes it to our screen: the experience of a wrong-headed human making decisions best left to the gods and living with the fallout. It's a much-needed challenge to our deification of decision makers, a concept that may frighten us but is necessary to demystify the people who control our lives.-Travis Hoover

Columbia Tri-Star presents the Academy Award-winning The Fog of War on DVD in an exceptional 1.78:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer--I'm not used to Errol Morris films receiving so much TLC in the telecine suite. Robert S. McNamara's interview segments were shot in HiDef using the Sony HDW-F900 (a.k.a. the Attack of the Clones camera), and their unsettling clarity in the absence of grain indicates that The Fog of War bypassed celluloid on the way to home video. Footage not generated by Morris obviously suffers from a variety of inconsistencies, all of them indigenous to the source as opposed to the master. The accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 audio spreads Philip Glass' score methodically across the soundstage, though the LFE channel doesn't play a big part in the mix. Occasional scratches and pops, which invariably plague the tape-recorded conversations sampled throughout the film, create such an artful contrast between the analogue and the digital that I wonder if they weren't partially fabricated.

Extras make this disc kind of indispensable, for they include a whopping 40 minutes worth of deleted scenes (albeit in non-anamorphic widescreen), one of which is a television commercial for Lyndon Johnson's re-election campaign that will have amateur archivists frothing at the mouth. Therein, the voice of a little girl tallying the petals as she picks them off a flower blends in with the countdown to a nuclear strike; the piece climaxes with a mushroom cloud, first seen as a reflection in the child's eyeballs, blooming in the distance. (The ad's tagline is "We must love each other, or we must DIE"! Dare I call this one of the greatest horror movies of the sixties?) Elsewhere, McNamara re-tells the story of Job and, less superfluously, touches on the coup in South Vietnam that quashed Kennedy's plan to bring a peaceful end to the war by gradually phasing out the 16,000 military advisors he had working under him. A separate page of credits follows these 25 elisions. "Robert McNamara's Ten Lessons"--text-based morsels prefaced by an audio introduction from McNamara himself (who explains that the eleven lessons in the film deviate from his personal decalogue)--round out the platter along with the trailer and two TV spots for The Fog of War plus trailers for Big Fish and Winged Migration.-Bill Chambers

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.