Movies into Film
The Fog of War
Directed by Erroll Morris
My Architect
Directed by Nathaniel Kahn
USA, 2003
Two Documentaries
Erroll Morris’s The Fog of War is a slickly made, meditative, curiously cool film, cool as in the West Coast jazz of the 1950s: Gerry Mulligan’s burnished baritone sax; Chet Baker’s honey-white trumpet, a horn of plenty dripping with élan. The movie relaxed me to the point where I might conceivably have lost all consciousness. Smoothly edited images glide by, so alluringly crisp and beautifully, artfully cut that they cry out for a set of fingerprints. It’s an interesting approach to a film filled with discussions of firebombing innocents and of forgetfully authorizing the use of Agent Orange. Is it, however, the right approach?
I would need more than a single viewing to make that decision.
Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, emerges as a thoughtful, captivating, grandfatherly raconteur. His stories about serving in the Air Force with General Curtis LeMay are horrifying, as they should be. Well before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it was LeMay, acting as an aerial Sherman, who burned Japan’s cities of wood architecture one by one. For those of us longing to see George W. Bush and John Ashcroft tried and convicted for war crimes, McNamara’s recollections here stir the blood: ''What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?'' (LeMay, McNamara tells us, wanted and would have exacted the same destruction in Cuba in 1962.)
For every intelligent move Morris makes, and there are a few of those on display—notably in his choice to show the heft of old reel-to-reel tapes that spin round as Vietnam-era admissions unfurl between McNamara and LBJ—he’ll do something pedestrian. The most serious mistake was hiring Philip Glass to compose a score. (Morris would have been better off with Mulligan and Baker—or with no music at all.) Glass’s work in The Fog of War, initially, is less terrible than the wretched score he penned for The Hours. He gives the woodwinds some notes to play. But by three-quarters into the film, the composer falls back on his trademark (and dreadful) string section da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-das. The images Morris presents and those that McNamara paints in words don’t require this kind of music. Glass adds nothing; I suspect that he subtracts a great deal. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in The Chicago Reader that Glass’s music “…encourages not thought but the impression that one is thinking.” In supplying such a spoon-fed stream of angst, Morris reveals a distrust of his material.
Although tidily divided into eleven sections, or “lessons,” the film ends with a coda that could and probably should have been excised. Morris has to underline the point that McNamara’s answers are evasive, as if an audience at a documentary somehow needs handholding. While an image of McNamara impassively driving off fills the screen, the audio track suggests that Morris chased him through the parking lot with questions so infantile (i.e. “Do you feel guilty?”) even Michael Moore wouldn’t have asked them. It’s a dud ending and a surprising one given the brilliant queries that Morris raises in his January 7th rebuttal to criticism from The Nation’s Eric Alterman. What do you do if you serve a President who wants to go to war no matter what?
I had planned to be lenient on Nathaniel Kahn’s self-serving vanity project My Architect. However, in light of the film’s recent Oscar nomination for best documentary, an undeserved nod that shuts out the vastly superior Stone Reader, I’m left with little choice but to wield my hatchet.
My Architect should be chiefly remembered as a case study of a filmmaker at odds with his own best footage. There are electrifying, elucidating moments embedded within this rigor mortis of amorphous irrelevancy. Instead of probing his interview subjects, as a more accomplished director might have done, Kahn turns on his heels and bounds in the opposite direction just as the going gets hot.
In piecing together the mystery of his late father’s secret lives, Kahn tracks down anyone with even the most cursory acquaintance to architect Louis Kahn. Kahn the younger would have done well to be more selective in his choices. Many of the interviews (such as those with an elderly rabbi whose impenetrable pronouncements require the use of subtitles; a ship captain who doubles as an orchestra conductor; and a stranger who may or may not have discovered Kahn the elder’s dead body at Penn Station in 1974) are either dull or pointless, often both.
Then, just as we have sunk into our chairs for a nap, arrives the salty, raspy-voiced nonagenarian Edmund Bacon to jar our senses awake with profane delight. Bacon ought to star in his own documentary: here’s a man who first rode a skateboard at age 92 to protest a mayoral ban on skateboarding in a park that he had designed. In the four or five minutes allotted to him here, Bacon burns up the screen. A priceless debunker of Utopia, this dean of Philadelphia architects takes umbrage to the notion that Louis Kahn should have played a greater role in Philly’s urban planning. “No, no, no, no, no!” Bacon splutters with rage in a scene that refreshingly counteracts the stifling fascism of Our Polite Society.
Kahn the younger commits a much graver offense than giving short shrift to Bacon and the other famous architects (Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, the wily Robert A.M. Stern) whom he splices in apparently for the sake of sound bytes. Sometimes in the course of creating a work of art, we discover what our real subject is, and it may not be what we had set out to create. In interviewing the two women with whom his father had long-term extramarital affairs, Kahn uncovers the real story, the heart, the nugget. Whether cowardice, shallowness, inexperienced judgment, or some other malady takes the blame, I only know that Kahn blinks before the great, inherent drama of his father’s legacy and walks away from it.
Louis Kahn wasn’t much to look at. He bore disfiguring facial scars from a childhood accident. Yet his two surviving “wives,” fellow architects Anne Tyng and Harriet Pattison, remain deeply in love with him decades later. Neither married nor had a significant other after their affairs with Kahn ended. The look on Tyng’s face, the edge in Pattison’s voice—how does Kahn’s son miss these? Pattison, the filmmaker’s mother, believed during her lover’s lifetime—and she still believes—that the architect was preparing to leave his marriage and live with her full-time. The mother-son tensions give My Architect some much needed bite and nuance. In one emotionally raw interview, Pattison challenges her little auteur: “What do you think? Do you think it’s a myth, Nathaniel?”
I could have watched and listened to this genuine human drama for hours. Unfortunately, the 116-minute running time affords infinite space to consistently out-of-focus long shots; to inane footage of Kahn the younger rollerblading to a dopey Neil Young song across the Salk Institute plaza; and to copious undistinguished photography of the unwieldy monstrosities (such as the Salk Institute) that comprise Louis Kahn’s life work. Much more so than an Oscar, My Architect merits a wrecking ball. –NPT
February 6, 2004
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com
Photo at the top: My Architect (New Yorker Films)