`Thirteen Days,” in which Kevin Costner plays Kennedy presidential aide Kenny O’Donnell, is a suitably taut and glossy thriller about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s sleek, fast and clean, racing through the facts with the same cool self-confidence it ascribes to the Kennedys and O’Donnell.
But I wonder whether the movies and TV news haven’t inured us against a proper fear of nuclear catastrophe. “Thirteen Days,” after all, is a political thriller about real-life events and people that could have brought about the end of our world, killed billions of people and incinerated much of the planet. And yet today, one shock of this film is how ordinary, even mundane, much of it looks.
In any case, the subject of “Thirteen Days’ is a great one: that brief span of time, Oct. 13-28, 1962, when the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. In popular mythology, it was the most dangerous face-off of the nuclear era — as well as the finest hour of the Kennedy brothers: John, the flawed but brilliant and charismatic president (Bruce Greenwood), and Bobby, the headstrong, fiery younger brother and attorney general (Steven Culp). Like the broader-ranging 1974 TV movie “The Missiles of October,” “Thirteen Days” tends to glorify them, celebrate their youth and grace, their coolness under fire. These are leaders, the movie suggests, stolen from us too soon.
For the two hours of “Thirteen Days” we watch them both — and the fellow members of the hastily assembled crisis team, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm for short) — grapple with the unthinkable. First McGeorge Bundy (Frank Wood), the president’s icy assistant for national security affairs, tips him to the U2 spy plane surveillance photos that prove the Soviets have put ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) in Cuba, even though the Soviets deny it. The president quickly forms ExComm, and its members (minus JFK himself) hash it out. Verbal battle lines are drawn between the hawks and the doves. Wavering between are Secretary of State Dean Rusk (Henry Strozier) and the two Kennedys.
Through the next 12 days, as ExComm tries to outguess/outthink their Russian counterparts, near-desperate diplomacy is waged. Soviet diplomats Andrei Gromyko (Olek Krupa) and Anatoly Dobrinyn (Elya Baskin) at first dissemble and then open up. Two crucial messages from Khrushchev — one intimate and emotional, the other hard and official-sounding — arrive. Soviet ships speed toward Cuba; a U.S. blockade meets them.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking — possibly toward doomsday.
Though the title “Thirteen Days” comes from Bobby’s account of the events, published in 1968, the movie takes its facts from many sources — the most important being “The Kennedy Tapes,” the recently published book of transcripts of the ExComm meetings. And it takes its perspective not from Bobby but from the man who served and loved both Kennedys: O’Donnell, Bobby’s Harvard classmate and JFK’s special adviser in the White House. As Costner plays him, O’Donnell is the ultimate best buddy: loyal, tough, indefatigable, smart. He is always there, with a steady eye and cool head — though Costner often mislays his Boston accent. (As with much in the movie, this portrait, minus the accent, has a solid basis in fact.)
I think it was a mistake, though, to make O’Donnell this movie’s center. It’s obvious why it was done: O’Donnell is the relatively ordinary guy who can act as witness to greatness. But we don’t really need that kind of witness. And the movie isn’t good at plumbing the complexities of the O’Donnell-Kennedys relationship — or, indeed, at revealing or digging into any of the rest of ExComm (except in the rare case when a part has been perfectly cast, like Kevin Conway as Gen. Curtis LeMay). This was a fascinating group — molded by World War II as leaders or soldiers, born to privilege or raised by achievement and circumstance. They were a macho meritocracy, with great strengths and great flaws.
But the movie never develops an effective way of giving us the thumbnail biographies that would show this; it counts too much on prior knowledge. Even though the actors are good, their characters stay stock. The major standout is Greenwood — the villainous husband of “Double Jeopardy” and the bereaved father of “The Sweet Hereafter” — who gets us deep inside John Kennedy, past the clipped accent and bedroom eyes to an inner pain and troubled intelligence that become quite convincing. (To a lesser extent, Culp does that with Bobby.)
So terrible and pivotal was the Cuban Missile Crisis — which may have directly led to the rest of the ’60s’ tragedies including the Kennedy assassinations — that the movie’s swiftness and cleanness become frustrating. I wanted more character, more analysis. But, as directed by Roger Donaldson (the New Zealand thriller specialist who teamed with Costner on “No Way Out”) and written by David Self (“The Haunting”), it’s a slick, efficient thriller that keeps driving forward lucidly and relentlessly. Many audiences will enjoy it, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the events — or with Boston accents.
But still, it needs more punch, more foreshadowing. Possibly, our movies — especially political thrillers, from 1962’s “The Manchurian Candidate” and 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove” on — have gotten too crazy for real life to retain its proper impact. In the hands of war-obsessed writers like Tom Clancy, or in outlandish movies like “Air Force One” (with Harrison Ford as the U.S. president slugging it out with terrorists single-handed), the plots inflate into gaseous absurdity. The movies, if not life itself, seem to have outstripped even near-apocalyptic events.
For anyone who really wants to plumb the meaning and experience the terror of these events, though, I recommend “The Kennedy Tapes.” Reading that book sends a real chill down your spine, as you see how the lives of the many can be subject to the whims, prejudices, errors and good or bad will of the few. These days, most historical accounts seem to agree that the Kennedys passed their test, stayed cool when others were hot. But that doesn’t mean we should stop worrying (and love the bomb). We should never let the cozy melodrama of the movies — or history — keep us from the honest paranoia our nuclear age deserves.
`THIRTEEN DAYS’
(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Roger Donaldson; written by David Self; photographed by Andrzej Bartkowiak; edited by Conrad Buff; production designed by Dennis Washington; music by Trevor Jones; produced by Armyan Bernstein. A New Line Cinema release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:25. MPAA rating: PG-13 (brief strong language).
THE CAST
Kenny O’Donnell ………….. Kevin Costner
President Kennedy ………… Bruce Greenwood
Robert F. Kennedy ………… Steven Culp
Robert McNamara ………….. Dylan Baker
Adlai Stevenson ………….. Michael Fairman
Gen. Curtis LeMay ………… Kevin Conway
Dean Acheson …………….. Len Cariou
Helen O’Donnell ………….. Lucinda Jenney
