Errol Morris documentary, subtitled "Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." It amounts to a sort of anti-war seminar chaired, hosted, conducted by the eighty-five-year-old former Secretary of Defense (a/k/a "Mac the Knife") throughout the first phase of the Vietnam War (a/k/a "McNamara's War"). What you think of it will be difficult to disentangle from what you think of him in specific, and war in general. The eleven lessons, taken straight from the horse's mouth, run along the lines of "Empathize with your enemy" and "Rationality will not save us" and "In order to do good you may have to engage in evil." Each of these and the eight others are neatly tied in to events from McNamara's life, illustrated with well-chosen archival footage to supplement Morris's nose-to-nose (or rather, nose-to-lens) interview material. Basic biographical information gets filled in along the way: infancy in World War I, college during the Great Depression, marriage and military service in World War II (when he would first team up with that Vietnam ogre, Gen. Curtis LeMay, architect of the firebombing of Tokyo), postwar prosperity with the Ford Motor Company, and then an invitation to Camelot to sit at the Round Table with Kennedy and Kennedy and Company. The movie compels your interest. But it might be better to say that the man compels your interest: an imposing man, and in the eyes of history an important man, by all accounts a brilliant man, seemingly, at this stage, self-assessing, self-transforming, and fearlessly self-revealing. But the movie can't, or anyway doesn't, supply sufficient information to sort out his motives or his truthfulness in here reshaping his legend and his legacy. It is no small thing for a man in his position to confess that his understanding of the essential nature of the conflict in Vietnam was incorrect -- and no small "scoop" for a documentary. But although he, together with the handholding filmmaker, cultivates assent on that and many other points -- and although the ticking-bomb background music of the ever-monotonous Philip Glass insists on the urgency and the magnitude of the business at hand -- these are social and political and historical rather than artistic issues. The artistry is little more than functional. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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