Thirteen Days

The challenge of making a gripping historical drama is maintaining suspense even when the entire audience knows the outcome of the story. That may not be a problem for a movie like “Braveheart,” because few people are terribly conversant with Scottish history. When an event has achieved the mythic status of the Cuban missile crisis, though, it becomes much more difficult. Everyone knows (we hope) that we never occupied Cuba or engaged in a full nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Given those constraints, “Thirteen Days” does a reasonable job of investing the story with a sense of, if not suspense exactly, urgency and uncertainty. The film is a full-on, big-budget recreation of a pivotal episode in American history. For his somewhat overlong script, David Self drew on “The Kennedy Tapes--Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis” and he hews roughly to the facts, with a bit of dramatic licensing. Chief among these licenses is the transformation of the Kevin Costner part, that of Kenny O’Donnell. In real life O’Donnell was JFK’s appointment secretary; in the film he becomes a “special advisor” and confidant and plays a central role in deciding how to handle the evolving crisis.

By choosing the role of supporting player, Costner has made what on the face of it would seem to be a shrewd move. He gets to play someone nobody has ever heard of (kind of a Rosencranz to JFK’s Hamlet) and act his heart out trying to humanize the story. Meanwhile, he leaves the Kennedy impersonations to Bruce Greenwood (JFK) and Steven Culp (RFK). The plan backfires though, because not only do Greenwood and Culp have the more compelling roles, they give the more compelling performances. Perhaps it is just the acknowledged fact that in matters of national importance, it is the president who sits on the hot seat, not his advisors, or maybe it is just lingering fascination with the Kennedys, but it is hard to get too worked up about O’Donnell’s conflicts. (Or maybe it is just the fact that Greenwood and Culp do a far better job than Costner of affecting the Harvard accent for which the Kennedys were famous.) We find ourselves drawn again and again to Jack and Bobby, and the film’s energy seems to flag whenever they leave the scene. Director Roger Donaldson (“No Way Out,” “Species”), plays it extremely straight, adopting a near documentary style, even to the point of running graphics during the picture to identify the key players.

He handles the camera well, though he makes a few odd choices, such as his seemingly random switching between color and black and white. He also allows the film to run too long, especially in view of the fact that we know how it is going to end. There is a lot of talking in the movie, as one might expect, but Self and Donaldson trick it up by including scenes involving the spy planes, destroyers, and fighter jets that participated in the analysis and blockade of Cuba. Of course, the bulk of the film centers on what must have been an impossibly tense time for the administration. Nuclear war did seem to be only single wrong move or miscalculation away, and some of the best parts of the film are the displays of political wrangling as JFK tries to parry the military advisors pushing for an invasion of Cuba. These advisors are portrayed, to an extent that is apparently not quite accurate, as Kennedy’s antagonists. The film has them bordering on insubordination, if not outright rebellion, as they mutter about “these damn Kennedys” destroying the nation. The movie depicts the conflict between the men involved at least as well, if not better, than it depicts the conflicts between the nations.

It also portrays JFK as human, a man wrought with doubt, well aware that a wrong decision could lead to a disaster of immense proportions. “Thirteen Days” does a good job of capturing the almost insane atmosphere that the era of “Mutually Assured Destruction” created. It neatly and clearly lays out the details of the foreign policy strategizing and decision making that went on behind the scenes. The entire episode takes on the air of a high-stakes chess match, with each side trying to anticipate the other side’s next two, three, and four moves, and prepare a response to each. The movie does an even better job, though, of capturing the innocence of the era, an era when reporters crowded right into the Oval Office, and the President addressed the nation from behind a cheap looking wooden lectern. There are even a few scenes in which O’Donnell drives up to the White House and walks right in through what appears to be an unguarded door. You won’t see that on “The West Wing,” and I don’t think you'd want to try it today. Politics has changed a lot since those long ago thirteen days and so have the movies. (1/18/2001)