He said, she said.

San Francisco Bay Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond's take on The Fog of War: "Errol Morris may be an accomplished documentary filmmaker, and there are plenty of valuable moments in his latest work, but as a political interview, the movie is a flop." Why? The one question that counts is held to the end and then Morris lets Robert McNamara get away with the most evasive of answers.

But Susan Gerhard listens to more than the words exchanged. Before getting to her argument, a few words from Morris himself in our interview with him this past summer:

I think a successful interview - it's an odd thing. There's this idea that in an interview, you pull things out of people, that you're involved in some gigantic tug of war.... To me, the most interesting stuff that I've heard in interviews has come from people offering me information, not my somehow cajoling them into saying stuff. The most interesting stuff has come out of a need to tell me something. And I don't even know enough to ask the right question. I don't.

In the eyes - and ears - of the SFBG film critic, the real making of Morris's film went on long after the interviews. It's all in the context Morris constructs around the Q&A, the sights - "images of chemical warfare, missiles dropping, nations destroyed" - and sounds, specifically Philip Glass's "assertive" soundtrack: "Which may be why Morris gives [McNamara] so much room to speak, even when he's evading; it's Glass who gives us the real interpretation. Glass's take comes through loud and clear in wind and strings: be afraid, be very afraid."

The juxtaposition of the two interpretations, both of them perfectly legitimate, of course, is revealing: the editor, zeroing in on the actual nuts and bolts of the content; the trained critic weighing the full cinematic spectrum.

Posted by dwhudson at January 21, 2004 1:32 PM