The Fog of War (2003) on Netflix
PG-1320031h 47mBiographyDocumentaryHistoryWar
At eighty-five, Robert McNamara recounts his life: a World War II bombing analyst, president of Ford, Secretary of Defense. He ran the Vietnam War as defense secretary under Kennedy and Johnson.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb8.0/1026,431 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Robert McNamara sits for interviews at eighty-five and recalls a life that carried him from San Francisco and Harvard Business School to the Army Air Forces, where he served under General Curtis LeMay, and then to the Ford Motor Company, which he briefly led. He leaves that post to become Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and keeps the job under Lyndon B. Johnson. The documentary sets his account beside archival footage, recordings of 1960s cabinet conversations and an original score, covering his part in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the widening of the Vietnam War. His account turns candid at some points and guarded at others, and the film is arranged around eleven lessons drawn from the interviews.
Cast
- Curtis LeMayas Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Fog of War (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Errol Morris only meant to make an hour of television. The interview with Robert McNamara kept being extended until Morris had around twenty hours of it, and he decided to make a feature instead.
- Morris filmed McNamara with a device of his own invention, the Interrotron, which throws images of interviewer and subject onto two-way mirrors in front of their cameras so each seems to be talking straight at the other, and McNamara appears to meet the audience's eye.
- McNamara did not accept the film's framing. At a 2004 Berkeley event he disagreed with Morris's reading of the lessons and later supplied ten new lessons of his own for the DVD, while refusing to apply them to the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that former defense secretaries should not judge the sitting one.
