thirteen days (2000)

"There is no Wise Old Man" :: another in the line of incredibly-long-okay-films containing kevin costner. it's a nice primer on the cuban missile crisis in the sense of historical mental-orientation: for those who know nothing or little on the subject, it will not hurt to watch this film and gather a sense of what one side of this four-sided debate (the United States government / the people of the United States / the Cuban government [i.e.: Fidel Castro] / the Russian Government) was in consideration of. the basic theme of the picture, though, appears to be of the very classical Transition of Times; kennedy is in constant reference to 'the guns of august', a pulitzer-prize winning book published in 1962; this cross-referencing with a (now publicly obscure) contemporary (to the depicted time) text, especially from the character of a united states president, is a very intriguing quality: the scene in which kennedy reads an excerpt from this book is, perhaps, the intellectual saving grace of the entire production. however, dylan baker as robert mcnamara, — especially the moment when he informs the old-man general that the cuban blockade is A NEW KIND OF LANGUAGE and not a ye-olden gung-ho battle, — as well as steven culp's performance as robert kennedy, are really quite good. costner is always costner, and his accent gets silly :: bruce greenwood bleeds into the character of kennedy at many moments, and although he may not initially look and sound like him, when all the military advisers and misc white house columns are gather in a room, sweating and panicking, greenwood certainly reigns the aura of a dignified neo-ciceronian president. there is an overall feeling, however, wrapped invisibly into the texture of the film (and punctuated deeply by the final images) of a, 'oh! what could have been!' had every single kennedy not been assassinated. what is the lesson of 'thirteen days' (2000)? [good] movies about presidents are movies made for sitting presidents.