(4/5)

No Doomsday marathon would be complete without a clenched-jaw nuclear showdown with the entire world hanging in the balance. And no nuclear showdown is quite as nerve-wracking as the Cuban Missile Crisis, if only because it actually happened. While too young to have lived through it, I still find a fascination with the deeply paranoid Cold War mindset if only because I recognize a glimmer of myself in it. Whether history repeats itself quite the way it happened in sixties America, the curse about living in interesting times feels shared between our two epochs.

Adapted from Robert Kennedy’s memoir of the same name, Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days places us in the inner sanctum of the Kennedy Administration as a potential nuclear conflict builds between the Soviets and the U.S. The tagline for the film is ‘you’ll never believe how close we came’, and this is its chief draw, for while the audience already knows how the story ends, potentially robbing the storytellers of any suspense, it is what many do not know about the daily occurrences leading up to the standoff that makes for the resulting tension. One miscommunication or rash decision after another set the dominoes in motion, and it ends up being more luck and happenstance than strategy that ultimately helps ward off catastrophe.

Thirteen Days opens the way Dr. Strangelove ends, with a mushroom cloud montage. No Vera Lynn tune plays over this montage however, here the horror of the visual is left preserved to sear in the mind before the story unfolds. We are then introduced to the power structure within the Kennedy administration: the Irish inner circle of the Kennedy brothers and their friend and Special Assistant to the President, Kenny O’Donnell, whose vantage point we the audience are following; they are portrayed as the doves to the somewhat pantomimed pro-war faction of eagles, between which Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, struggles to find a pragmatic compromise. As ideologies clash, windows of opportunity shorten, and the fear of nuclear escalation intensifies, Thirteen Days depicts just how much human fallibility played a role in a conflict that neither party wished to provoke. It is a fascinating look at how politics has a life of its own, a chess game where players like JFK and Khrushchev were nothing more than pieces among many being played by some higher force.

Kevin Costner plays O’Donnell, the sixties everyman with a somewhat awkward Mayor Quimby accent that improves as the film goes along. Whether historically accurate or not, in the film O’Donnell is the voice of reason, advising the Kennedys mostly on how to play politics with this crisis, as they time and again revert back to an ethics that is ill-suited to the game. Canadian actor, Bruce Greenwood, plays the showy role of JFK, and without doing an overt imitation nor looking all that much like the former president, Greenwood creates a Kennedy that carries the drama rather than distracts from it. Likewise, the actor who plays Bobby Kennedy evokes without parody. The only exception in the film is Dylan Baker as McNamara, which seems more of a slicked back caricature of the man from Fog of War.

Stylistically, Thirteen Days is stagy, indicative in part of its chamber-piece structure in and around the Oval Office as the shit hits the fan. Still, made long after Oliver Stone’s JFK, it is jarringly conventional and a bit stilted, reverting at times to wrought sentimentality (particularly with the scenes concerning O’Donnell and the outside world). The film came out a year before 9/11 and it does feel dated in a way that something only nine years ago ought not to feel. I think this has less to do with the film and more to do with the transformations that happened shortly after it came out, both culturally post-9/11 and stylistically, when only a couple years later Paul Greengrass single-handedly transformed the cinematic language of the procedural drama with films like Bloody Sunday and United 93.

While the style is uninspired, Thirteen Days still delivers on suspense and intrigue by the strength of the story it has to tell, and because of this, and some of the performances, I highly recommend it.