Review of Thirteen Days (2000) by Julio Z — 10 Jul 2009

Sometimes Kevin Costner just can't be told. On Tin Cup he couldn't be told that a scene of him beating a security guard to a bloody pulp because he forgot his ID card wasn't going to endear him to the audience in a romcom (I never saw the finished film, but I believe the preview audiences succeeded in getting that scene cut). In The Postman he couldn't be told that ending a film with a statue of him being unveiled was really not a good idea. At all. And in Thirteen Days he couldn't be told that adopting a Boston accent was not a good idea when it makes him sound just like Elmer Fudd. For the first quarter of an hour you're just waiting for him to say "Be wewwy, wewwy qwuiet. I'm hunting Wussian Miss-eyells." So it's a testament to the strength of the film that it survives that hurdle and emerges as a gripping thriller even though we all know the ending.

Although Costner gets top billing, the film really belongs to Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp as JFK and Bobby Kennedy, avoiding impersonation (and the accent) to give quite superb performances. While the film is occasionally guilty of overglamorizing the dynamic duo, it's surprising to see just how little control they were able to exercise over the Chiefs of Staff who seemed hell-bent on escalating the Cuban Missile Crisis into a full-scale invasion. Considering the final result, it seems particularly timely now to see a drama about a president desperate to avoid a pointless war over weapons of mass destruction that he knew DID exist at a time when we have a president who was desperate to start a pointless war over weapons that he knew DIDN'T exist: for all the corruption, spin and dilettantism of the Kennedy administration, this was one of those fortuitous examples of the right leader at the right time.

The film certainly manages to pull off the rare achievement of instilling a real sense of pride not in action but in diplomacy, with most of the drama taking place in conference rooms (although there are a couple of genuinely exciting pieces of film-making in the spy flights over Cuba). Indeed, perhaps the most genuinely stirring moment is Adlai Stevenson calling the Russian ambassador's bluff at the UN, the sort of thing which doesn't exactly pull in the kids at the multiplex. This doesn't always pay dividends, however. The biggest problem is that it loses tension by being so confined to the political and military players: there's no sense of the very real fear that spread throughout the world that this really was IT and that the mushroom clouds would start sprouting any minute. As a result the movie does begin to lose its grip towards the end, and doesn't entirely dodge mawkishness. The sporadic early shifts from color to black and white are a real failure, too. With the archive footage in color, there simply seems no reason for them, and they seem to have been thrown in arbitrarily purely to give it an imagined cutting edge. Still, they're fairly minor flaws in an impressive thriller.