'Thirteen Days'

"Thirteen Days" is fascinating history, but the movie isn't remotely as gripping as the near-Armageddon it portrays. Ironic that nuclear bombs are much more likely to go off today than 30 years ago, but pols don't worry about it much. The film evokes a pre-digital time when media wasn't a talk-show-driven hysteria machine, diplomats saber-rattled via teletype and the only way to make absolutely sure something was a missile was to fly a plane right over it. WARNING: plot is discussed but everybody knows the ending here. Next week: "Antitrust," the film allegedly inspired in part by the Microsoft mess.

It's odd to watch the Cuban missile crisis movie "Thirteen Days," a little disorienting. Three decades after the events it portrays, the Cold War is over, but the world has thousands more nuclear missiles armed and ready to launch than it did then. Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its deteriorating military, the rise of terrorism, and the growing availability of bomb-making materials, they are even more likely to be used.

But not in the kind of nose-to-nose stand off that paralyzed the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, it seemed for a few days that the U.S. and Russia would actually go to war over the deployment of long-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Tough lines were drawn, and armies were fully mobilized. The world actually held its breath as the young Kennedy administration grappled with one of history's most intense political crises.

The stakes were breathtakingly high, especially against the backdrop of a ruthless, hard-line Soviet government, a bitter military stand-off in Berlin as well as Cuba, and an American military filled with hubris. Yet government, years before the full blown media explosion and the rise of sophisticated satellite tracking and the Net, operated in much more secrecy than it can today. So much of the political strategizing and maneuvering involved in the pre-digital world were unknown by the general public.

(I was a kid during the stand-off, and about all I remember was our entire block gathered around a black-and-white TV in Providence, R.I., to hear Kennedy's grainy, grim speech declaring a military blockade of Cuba. Everybody was stunned and totally silent. Parents rushed off after the speech to the market to stockpile food. I'd never seen adults scared witless like that. They believed nuclear war was imminent. The next morning, we practiced running to school bomb shelters all morning, as air raid drill sirens sounded for hours.)

"Thirteen Days," dramatizes some of that process, but like a slick history lesson, it still has the aura of an educational exercise. It's certainly interesting and it does, in fact, offer a compelling, behind-the-scenes feeling as John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood), his brother Bobby (Steven Culp) and their trusted adviser Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) fend off the reliably warlike and conniving Pentagon brass. (When exactly did Hollywood come to hate generals so much? Can you remember a positive recent portrayal of one?) Costner, Greenwood and Culp are all workmanlike, but oddly flat and one-dimensional.

What's intriguing about the movie is our sense of witnessing the handling of a momentous crisis inside the White House. The menacingly interwoven shots of nuclear test explosions are gorgeous and horrifying, as they were in "Terminator 2" and other movies.

But several problems detract from our enjoyment. Some are fairly minor. The movie is too long by about a half-hour. You can see boom mikes at some theaters hovering at the top of the screen in many of the Oval Office sequences (perhaps a projectionist error at the small town New England theater where I saw the movie. Did anybody else see this?).

But then moviegoers should be aware that they aren't getting meticulous history. According to journalists who covered the crisis and historians who've studied it, the Kenneth O'Donnell character played by Costner (a Kennedy crony and special assistant to the president) wasn't nearly as pivotal in the real show-down as he was in this film.

This portrayal is especially generous to the Kennedy brothers, whose wit and sense of responsibility are credited with saving the world. The movie takes no notice of the series of subsequent revelations about both brothers that calls their nobility and even-handedness into question.

Despite that, it's interesting to see the relatively primitive spook technology that political leaders depended on -- high flying but vulnerable U2's and jet spy planes to gather data, slow-moving teletypes, and the low-tech, comparatively miniminalist mass media who weren't quite such a runaway, all encompassing hysteria-machine. They actually worried about national security concerns when they reported news.

And it's fascinating to be cinematically drawn into one of the great collisions between the horrific new technology of warfare -- weapons everybody in government seems to agree are too horrible to be used -- and to contrast that with an era when a terrorist cell or a Ukranian accident can trigger horrendous destruction -- a grim reality some scholars feel is inevitable, that negotiators and governments may be powerless to deal with, and that people seem to have grown almost comfortable with.

The Kennedys weren't. The film and history suggests that John Kennedy was determined to avoid a full-scale nuclear catastrophe, and mustered the confidence and courage to press for a political way out of a confrontation that was within hours of becoming a war. This is the kind of movie high school teachers will be showing history classes for years to come, even if it's hardly as dramatic as the near-Armageddon it seeks to portray.

Comments

Re:Why we aren't as worried about nuclear war

[RayChuang]

Actually, building a nuclear device is NOT as simple as people think.

Getting the fissile material and explosive triggers are one thing, but ASSEMBLING a nuclear bomb is quite something else--it requires an extremely high level of precision machining that very few can afford.

That's why at most a terrorist nuclear device would have a yield of at most 4-5 kT. Mind you, a 4-5 kT device detonated in front of the New York Stock Exchange will still kill many thousands of people. :-(

High School Teachers?

[iElucidate]

Generally high school teachers try to avoid movies that are as inaccurate or uninformative as this one. Instead, I expect them to show The Missiles of October, a television movie based partly on RFK's book Thirteen Days but much deeper and all around more informative than this cinematic dullness. In Thirteen Days the movie, all we see in Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy. Now, I love JFK and RFK as much as the next guy, but how about seeing how this crisis is playing out everywhere else? In Cuba? In the Kremlin? In the US press? Or in EXCOMM, whose meetings we rarely see.

The movie acts like its the Kennedy brothers against a vast conspiracy of generals who want world destruction, when it wasn't that at all. Additionally, we never get to see or hear about some of the most important decisions of the crisis, such as Kruschev's two letters to Kennedy and the meetings of the OAS when they decide to back the US. Finally, the UN scenes are a circus, with everyone cheering on Stevenson as he yells at the Russian ambassador.

All in all, an interesting movie with some nice looks at the U2 pilots etc., but not worthwhile for serious history buffs.

Sorry to say it but...

[jatbrowne]

...Better red than dead. (Its a joke) It'll be a sad day when films get shown in class instead of real history (ie something closer to the truth). ESPECIALLY when the subject of the film is an event that was as sensitive to Amreican political sensibilities as the Cuban missile crisis. Take it as gospel at your peril, and remember that the Russian account of events is no less and no more valid than your own. jb

Re:Why we aren't as worried about nuclear war

[PHAEDRU5]

If the sword of Damocles hangs over you long enough, you just go about life as usual.

Maybe the sword will fall, maybe it won't. In the meantime, there's life to be lived.