served to dampen their self-importance. Did they really have the right to an opinion? The anti-war remarks seemed subtle and tentative—albeit still more outspoken than those of equivocating Senate Democrats. Mexican, Irish, and Spanish presenters and recipients were far less ambiguous in their comments on the war than their American counterparts. (Of the fifty-nine Oscar winners assembled, only four—Sarandon, Day-Lewis, Anjelica Huston, and Ben Kingsley—wore the silver squiggle, and only two are American.)
The tension was palpable when arch provocateur Michael Moore advanced to the stage. But the enthusiastic standing ovation faded to silence and turned to boos when the filmmaker broke the frame by invoking the “fictitious” 2000 election and questioning Bush’s “war for fictitious reasons.” Moore succeeded in using the Oscars to reach the billion-person viewing audience. But despite his well-prepared statement, the filmmaker was not to be the evening’s hero. The Oscars are, before anything else, the industry’s main way to feel good about itself.
Would this embarrassment be the evening’s moment to remember? There was no John Wayne on hand to shoot down the obstreperous Moore. As if on cue, Jack Valenti wandered out, too stunned or clueless to defend the honor of the Bush administration. Hollywood saved itself when, in a performance worthy of a second Oscar, Adrien Brody stopped the show. The surprise Best Actor winner had the youthful energy to expend ten precious seconds and who knows how much bodily fluid kissing Halle Berry and the presence of mind to express his gratitude to the Academy, thank his mother (photographer Sylvia Plachy), and—silencing the band—cite the war, enact anguish, and invoke Allah. He even wound up by naming a childhood friend who was an actual American combatant in Kuwait.
It was only then that Academy president Frank Pierson could, speaking like the fictitious president, extend an offer of peace to the Iraqi people, who were even then being bombed, a mere flick of the remote away.
In the early hours of April 2, CNN broke the story that US Army Rangers and Navy Seals had stormed Saddam Hospital in Nasiriya and rescued a prisoner of war, Private Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old army maintenance worker captured in an Iraqi ambush on March 23. That morning, newscasts and newspapers put forth a picture of Pvt. Lynch on a stretcher, sheltered by a folded American flag, and it was reported that she had sustained at least one gunshot wound in her battle with Iraqi soldiers. April 3, the Washington Post ran a front-page story headlined “She Was Fighting to the Death” that, citing unnamed government officials, suggested that Lynch was a veritable teenaged Rambo who “fought fiercely” and sustained multiple gunshot and stab wounds. “Hollywood could not have dreamed up a more singular tale,” per the April 14 issue of Time. Almost immediately, NBC announced plans for a made-for-TV movie to be called Saving Private Lynch.1
The Saving Private Lynch scenario dominated US war coverage even after Baghdad fell on April 9—symbolized by the rigorously staged and tightly framed toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in the city’s main square, an event that was made for TV and routinely compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. (“Lights! Camera! Combat! Iraq Passes Its Screen Test,” per weekly Variety’s April 14 front page: “Viewed as showbiz, the Iraq war was a winner, as expertly executed as it was scripted.”) On May 1, in a photo op seemingly inspired by the 1986 movie Top Gun, George W. Bush piloted a Navy S-3B Viking onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, standing in a flight jacket before a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, declared victory: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Soon afterward, US toy companies were manufacturing twelve-inch action figures of the president in a flight suit, some labeled “Top Gun.”2
As the Events of 9/11 deranged the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, so the war in Iraq was a tangible presence at the next international film festival I attended.
CANNES, MAY 30, 2003
The appropriate Hollywood ending for the 2003 Cannes Film Festival would have been a Palme d’Or garland for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. Directed by a seventy-three-year-old legend, rhapsodically received by French and American auteurists alike, this character-driven crime thriller offered an opportunity to end a lackluster festival with a burst of manufactured glamour.
Even more interesting, a winning Mystic River—which, like many of Eastwood’s movies, can be read as a meditation on lone-wolf, vigilante justice—would have provided a suitably ambiguous conclusion for the much discussed Franco-American tensions that, as explicated in the pages of Variety and the leftish French daily Libération, provided this festival with its particular narrative. Instead, the jury (evidently as unhappy with the quality of the competition films as the press) opted for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant—a poetic evocation of a Columbine-like American high school shooting that was attacked by Variety’s Todd McCarthy as “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst,” but that proved markedly more popular with French critics than Americans.
Elephant, though stronger on formal values and surface tension than social context or psychological analysis, was scarcely the least movie that the jury, headed by French director Patrice Chéreau and including Americans Steven Soderbergh and Meg Ryan, might have decorated. Strictly in terms of passion, originality, and sustained cinematic chutzpah, however, Lars von Trier’s allegory Dogville towered over the competition. Still, speaking of unpopular foreign entanglements, the most topical and perhaps the most universally admired movie in Cannes’ official section was Errol Morris’s The Fog of War—a documentary portrait, shown out of competition, of former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Culled from over twenty hours of interviews, annotated with archival footage and declassified White House tapes, scored to Philip Glass’s now axiomatic angst-drone, the movie allows the still-formidable octogenarian to reveal what he was taught by the Cuban missile crisis (“we came that close—that close!—to war”) and to detail his lesser-known experiences as contributor to the World War II firebombing of Japan and later, pioneer of the automobile seat belt.
Once upon a time, McNamara personified the military industrial complex. A stellar technocrat and a brilliant efficiency expert, this so-called walking IBM machine went from running the giant Ford Motor Company (the first non-family member to do so) to administering the even more colossal US Defense Department (where he was similarly credited with putting the Pentagon under civilian control).
The young McNamara was the most iconic of Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen. His bulldog look—slicked-back hair, rimless glasses—and arrogant pugnacity made him a star. Four decades before Donald Rumsfeld, McNamara invented his successor’s steely smile and jaunty certitude, which is only one reason why The Fog of War is almost ridiculously relevant. Vietnam is the war that remains to be resolved. Senator John Kerry, the leading Democratic challenger to George W. Bush, established his integrity as a decorated and wounded Vietnam vet who became an outspoken—and consequently vilified—opponent of the war. Bush, on the other hand, used his family privilege to secure alternate service in the National Guard and then dodged even that when it proved inconvenient.
Distressingly, Morris generally allows McNamara to put his own spin on the Vietnam War. Following a line advanced by Oliver Stone among others, McNamara suggests that Kennedy was waiting until after the 1964 election in order to disengage from South Vietnam and blames Lyndon Johnson for the debacle. But Johnson’s White House tapes—which is to say, the phone calls that he bugged for posterity and which were released in 1997—tell a different story. In one of the first, made six months after Johnson became president, McNamara invokes the verdict of history in warning his new boss that the US can’t allow itself to be “pushed out of Vietnam.” That summer, the exaggerated and bungled Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which The Fog of War acknowledges without pressing McNamara on his long years of dissembling about it, served to stampede the Congress into supporting Johnson’s policy.3
While McNamara several times broaches the subject of war crimes and appears prepared to re-examine his own mistakes, he’s remarkably unwilling to accept any personal responsibility. If McNamara does not come across as a grandstanding prevaricator like Henry Kissinger, one may still well wonder
