It’s not that surprising really. The private-detective-turned-documentarian has always found space in his heart for the most peculiar people. Like the lion-tamers and topiary gardeners of Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control. Or Fred A. Leuchter, the control-freak creator of the electric chair depicted in Dr. Death. Or Randall Adams, the wrongly convicted death-row inmate released on the strength of Morris’ film The Thin Blue Line, who subsequently attempted to sue his saviour for a share of the movie’s profits.
Here, McNamara joins Morris’ gallery of notable eccentrics and everyday surrealists to recount his years as US Secretary of Defence. Using interviews, archive footage and declassified White House documents in a chapter form that recalls 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (the 1993 François Girard film which was hugely indebted to Morris in a doc-will eat-itself sort of way), the 86-year-old McNamara discusses vital lessons learned under John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson, while nursing both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Indochinese maelstrom that became the Vietnam War. Chillingly, McNamara recounts his statistically determined decision to bomb 1.9 million Japanese at the end of World War Two with the phrase, “In order to do good you have to be willing to do evil”. Of course, he has since admitted to disproportionate use of force against civilians, and here states his belief that he and Air Force General Curtis LeMay would have been tried as war criminals had they not been among the victors.
Does this mark something of a deathbed conversion? Are McNamara’s eloquent tirades against current US unilateralism a return from Damascus or one last Machiavellian bow? Well, it certainly doesn’t help his case that his lupine glowering is eerily reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld’s smile-while-I-feast-on-your-heart bedside manner. Nevertheless, if it doesn’t quite banish the whiff of sulphur, this is a fearsomely moving and endlessly fascinating film. The subject and the director make for a sensational pairing, with Mc Namara’s steely calculating pragmatism providing the ultimate counterweight for Morris, a man whose films have always bespoke a universe where everything happens by accident, and nothing is predestined but mortality.
And that, of course, is a looming factor here. The final scenes in particular, with McNamara frail and anguished, are astonishingly affecting. In Morris’ films all worlds must end, whether for statesmen or women who think their radioactive sand is growing. As ever, it’s a humbling privilege and a complete joy to watch his work. The Fog of War is film that aspires to the condition of lush music - it builds and swells and leaves you with a lump in your throat. Even if you care nothing for geopolitics or the world you live in, you still have to go see this and don’t spare the whip.