Review of The Fog of War (2003) by Rachel M — 05 Oct 2004

I've been a fan of Errol Morris since hist first movie, the Gates of Heaven, a wonderful documentary on pet cemeteries and the people who run them and who cope with losing their.

This was a great movie. I've got the raw footage I want to edit into a documentary on Harvey Matusow. Matusow was someone who made mistakes early in life and paid for that by going to prison and then spent the latter part of his life reflecting on that in the shadow of his youthful indiscretions.

Morris captures Robert Macnamara as an older man reflecting on the choices he made in life. The contradictions between what he believed and felt obligated to do in the middle of the Cuban Missle Crisis and Vietnam and his ability to reflect honestly on that time from a more enlightened perspective made for such a powerful portait of humanity.

It also made such a great history lesson to hear how he got sucked into it and how once he was there he couldn't pull enough sway to change Lyndon Johnson's path once he realized he wasn't happy with where it was all headed. Hearing him tell how the Cuban Missle Crisis developed and how the US was sure Cuba didn't have missile warheads yet, then hearing that Castro later told him he had the missiles [i]and wanted to use them on the USA - [/i]this was particularly chilling realizing how close we'd really come to a nuclear conflict and how we didn't even know how close we came until years later, and that it was Kruschev and not Castro we could thank for not dropping nukes on us.