2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.

A father and son at the end of time

Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.

But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.

The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.

In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.

Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.

Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.

They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.

But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.

McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.

McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.

Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.

Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.

Stare into my eyes, Vampire

As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.

Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.

I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.

New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.

Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pale complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.

Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.

The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.

I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.

All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?

If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.

Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.

Smile already.

Why Marlon Wayans is cast in garbage

The Internet is full of dumb trivia, but this one is not only dumb, but completely retarded. It was a trivia nugget that appeared on the front page of IMDb, though I think these nuggets must cycle randomly because it wasn't there when I returned. It said, and I quote (because you can't make this shit up): "Marlons Wayans was cast as Ripcord [in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra] after his performance in Requiem For a Dream (2000). Wayans is also a fan of G.I. Joe."

How the producers of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra could watch Requiem For a Dream — a serious, honest-to-goodness FILM of the highest order — and come to the conclusion that he's perfect for their absurd, big-budget, stale-popcorn piece of shit MOVIE is beyond all comprehension. The fact that they were even allowed to say G.I. Joe and Requiem For a Dream in the same sentence proves they're absolutely insane, and Requiem director Darren Aronofsky gets to knee each of them in the balls until they are dead. If anything it's a sad commentary on Marlon Wayans, who hasn't done enough work for Joe producers to name-drop. What are they going to do, say "We picked Marlon for an elite super-soldier because he played a terrific man-baby in Little Man"? Or, "Marlon did white-face better than anyone I've ever seen in White Chicks so we had to have him in this lame-ass action movie." Of course not. The producers are going to name-drop the best thing Marlon has ever done, and that's Requiem, a movie he did 10 years ago and has nothing to do — in this universe or any alternate universes — with G.I. Joe.

Now Whip It / Into Shape / Shape It Up

Whip It is a sports movie for women, by women, starring women. It’s more sexy than it is macho and for that I’m not sure how a strident feminist would react to it, although I’d hope they approve because Whip It could be an empowering movie for women stuck in the daily grind of womanhood. After all, men aren’t the only athletes who want to bash in an opponent's nasal cavity with an elbow.

The sport is women’s roller derby. Decades ago male and female versions were injected into pop culture as legitimate sporting events. They never really took off. In the last decade, though, a revival has popped up in major cities across the country. More sideshow novelty than sport — matches are often held in gutted warehouses — women’s roller derby was reinvented for the hellbilly, tongue-in-cheek hipster crowd. And that’s how it’s presented here: as a busty tattooed subculture for the ironic and cynical.

Texas beauty pageant contestant Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) discovers the sport in a head shop, where her mom admires a display of bongs and blurts out, “Oh, what pretty vases you have here.” Lying to her parents, Bliss says she’s going to an SAT class, but instead hops on the senior citizen BINGO bus to Austin, the hub of Texas’ underground roller derby league. It’s there she watches her first match and falls in love — partly with the sport, mostly with the rebellious spirit that pumps through the rowdy players’ veins.

After the match, she meets members of one of the teams, the Hurl Scouts, and they convince her to come to tryouts to which she says, “The last time I wore skates they had Barbies on them.” But the derby girls — with stage names such as Smashley Simpson, Rosa Sparks, Bloody Holly, Maggie Mayhem and Princess Slaya — convince her to try out anyway, though 17-year-old Bliss tells another lie, that she’s 22 years old for the adults-only league.

Of course Bliss makes the team. Of course she helps the pathetic Hurl Scouts climb from the cellar to the top of their division. Of course her age is revealed before the championship match, moments before her disapproving mother wanders in late to have her quiet and proud moment in the back of the crowd. Whip It is not short of cliché. Nor is it shy about even hiding them. But honestly, who cares? Whip It is a deliriously fun movie, one of the most energetic and sincere of the year. And it may use cliché to its occasional detriment, but the film is still a complete original.

What a wonderful and cohesive cast, too. Ellen Page, still sparkling from Juno, is a treasure. She’s thrown up against some big personalities here — including SNL genius Kristen Wiig, singer Eve, stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Death Proof) and a hilarious Andrew Wilson, brother to Owen — yet Page never flinches, never misses a beat, and still acts the daylights out of her co-stars. She’s even given her own catchphrase on the derby track after a long pause and a slow camera zoom: “Let’s. Go. Apeshit.” she says, looking as menacing as her petite frame will let her. There’s also an electric performance by Juliette Lewis, basically playing a nuttier version of herself as derby villain Iron Maven, and another by Drew Barrymore, who seems to get grotesquely injured in every scene.

Barrymore, a staple in Hollywood since her big breakthrough in E.T. in 1982, directs Whip It like maybe she’s been paying attention all these years on movie sets. Her film — from a Shauna Cross screenplay and book — is so much more than a sport movie; it’s a coming-of-age story more delicate than all the flying elbows and knuckle sandwiches will let you believe. It’s really about Bliss being honest with her parents (played by Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern), who don’t see the innocent cuteness in the derby antics.

At times Barrymore mounts the camera on a set of skates and takes off down the banked track capturing handheld images of bloody fists, scabbed kneecaps and mini-skirted derby brawlers. And then, on a dime, she can turn around to allow tender moments for Bliss to cry in reflection at the places her lies have taken her, or not taken her. At one point, Bliss gets a boyfriend, but Barrymore doesn’t let Whip It become some kind of inane romantic comedy. And yet there’s a lovely scene in a swimming pool that is probably one of the sexiest non-sex scenes filmed in some time.

Barrymore also has an ingenious way of describing the rules of roller derby: she has Wilson sketch them out on a white board in pictures so simple that the scene ends with the drawing of a smiley face. If only, as a favor to me, she could use the same method to now describe cricket, a sport that needs some simplification.

I enjoyed Whip It tremendously. The film reinforced one belief (Ellen Page is marvelous) and laid the foundation for another (Drew Barrymore as talented director). And if you’re like me, after seeing Whip It you’ll be searching the Internet for the nearest roller derby match.

McNamara, icon of war, bares his soul

This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.

The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.

The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.

McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.

The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.

Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.

Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.

Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.

Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.