What happened?

Thirteen Days keeps the suspense going

by Gary Susman

To appreciate Thirteen Days, the latest retelling of the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps it helps to be, like me, too young to remember the real thing. Those old enough to recall that 1962 event may find the film does little justice to either the dread of imminent nuclear apocalypse they felt during the duck-and-cover era or the shiny image they had of Camelot's Kennedys -- both unrecoverable now. But if you have no investment in the paranoia of the Cold War or the Kennedy mythos, you may find Roger Donaldson's film a suspenseful thriller, as well as an object lesson in politics, crisis management, and spin control.

Like Apollo 13, another real-life tale of narrowly averted disaster from the recent past, Thirteen Days is rich in suspense, given that we know it all turned out okay in the end. The movie breaks the big crisis down into a seemingly endless series of smaller ones; the headlong pacing doesn't let the president and his advisers breathe easy for a moment. It's still a movie about a bunch of furrow-browed white guys in suits sitting around tables -- only the occasional display of expensive vintage jets and destroyers makes Thirteen Days seem more like a Hollywood action film than the made-for-Turner TV docudrama it essentially is -- yet all that talk retains power and freshness, maybe because screenwriter David Self distilled it from recently transcribed tapes from the Kennedy White House.

The emphasis on talk results in a portrayal of the crisis as a political rather than a military event. John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) and Robert F. Kennedy (Steven Culp) find themselves contending with not only the Soviets, who've brought the nuclear threat to America's doorstep by placing missiles in Cuba, but also with the US military chiefs, who are (according to the film) itching to finish the Bay-of-Pigs-aborted job of destroying Fidel Castro, regardless of the consequences. (One fanciful but eerie sequence has the White House urging a pilot, who's played by JFK nephew Christopher Lawford, to lie to his superiors about being hit by Cuban fire, lest they retaliate.) JFK must also face down the press, his party bosses, the United Nations, and, of course, the American people.

The story unfolds not through the eyes of John F. Kennedy but through those of White House aide Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner). That Costner is starring in another paean to JFK may make Thirteen Days seem like a misguided vanity project, but actually it's helpful to have the Kennedys at a distance, to see them through the eyes of someone who knew them, rather than through the iconography we've been inundated with over the years or the tarnishing of those icons through the family's scandals and tragedies.

To O'Donnell, a Boston-bred Irish Catholic and a Harvard classmate of RFK's, the president and the attorney-general are his two closest friends from the neighborhood. Any observer of Massachusetts's clannish politics will appreciate where O'Donnell is coming from when he screams at a fickle courier that politics is all about loyalty. It's his loyalty to his two old pals that guides his cajoling, his advice, and his defense of them against everyone else.

Costner grows ever more calcified as an actor, but it's fun to see him angry and desperate, in a way he seldom has been since the last time director Roger Donaldson sent him careering through Washington (in No Way Out). Still, the standout is Greenwood's JFK. He doesn't look much like the president, and neither does he make much of an attempt (as Costner foolishly does) at the accent, but he conveys a quick mind, a combative will, a ready wit, and the charisma to prod others to do their best work for him. If his Kennedy didn't exist, Aaron Sorkin would have had to invent him. Thirteen Days may not be entirely accurate (a scene where future Vietnam hawk Robert McNamara stands up to a bellicose admiral rings especially false), but these days, we could do worse than a movie that gives us a president who inspires confidence and merits loyalty.