Thirteen Days: Short-Range Tragedy

The morning after seeing Thirteen Days I rang my friend Janet Coleman first thing. It was way too early to be calling anyone, but I was dying to talk to her. There were things I wanted to ask her about Roger Donaldson's elegant docudrama on the Cuban missile crisis?like what she thought had been the impulse behind the movie, and whether she realized how much like a play it was, and how faithful she reckoned it was to actual events?I mean apart from the fact (which everyone seems to know and take for granted) that it greatly exaggerates the role of Kennedy friend and adviser Kenneth O'Donnell (Kevin Costner). Janet actually appears in the movie, playing JFK's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. She's the one who slaps Costner on the hand outside the Oval Office at the beginning, telling him the candy is for the children. Later, when the President is about to sign the order initiating the blockade, she's glimpsed briefly standing beside the famous oak desk wielding a blotter, managing to look both rumpled and starchy at the same time.

I like not being able to isolate the motivation behind a movie (it's often a mark of subtlety), and Thirteen Days had me mystified. Like everyone else, I'd assumed (in light of that central distortion and the fact that Costner himself is one of the producers) that the main idea had been to hand Costner a starring role. It isn't like that at all. Thirteen Days isn't a vehicle for Costner. The "stars" of the picture?to the extent that there are any?seem to be Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp, who give such uncanny performances as the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby. The character Costner plays (he isn't even a sidekick, he's a Kennedy errand-boy) actually has comparatively little screen time and almost none of it is spent being heroic?not in any of the traditional Hollywood senses. He doesn't have any big dramatic lines or scenes or moments; there are no confrontations from which he emerges the victor. There's really only one great scene and it belongs to Dylan Baker, who as Robert McNamara has to keep an old-school admiral from following "the rules of engagement" at one point and gets more affect into the syllables "John Paul Jones" than they have ever been invested with before.

But Costner isn't even giving his "love me because I'm such a loser and such an unimportant and regular guy" performance. Rather (and I think this is one of the reasons people seem to emerge from the movie with such respect for it and for him) Costner has chosen to be one of a company of extraordinary actors?both New York stage veterans and virtual unknowns?in a genuine ensemble piece. A lot of the time he's in the background. More often, he's the least important of three characters in a scene. In fact, with its emphasis on three-way conversations held in the presence of a highly opinionated chorus with a stake in the outcome, Thirteen Days reminded me of a Greek tragedy more than almost any contemporary drama I've ever seen.

I'm not quite old enough to remember the autumn of 1962. Possibly for that reason I have no views on the Cuban missile crisis. A friend of mine says the whole thing was just a big p.r. stunt cooked up by the Kennedys, and that the mid-range missiles in Cuba presented no more appreciable threat to us than the long-range ones we already knew about in the USSR. Maybe he's right. I don't care. I don't think Thirteen Days is about "the fate of the free world" so much as it's about a particular moment when show business?acting, scripting, blocking, presentation, choreography?began to move from the periphery of public life to its center. In fact, more than any other film I've seen recently (with the possible exception of Gladiator), Thirteen Days seemed to me to be about theater in the way that the plays of Shakespeare or David Mamet sometimes are.

The three-actor convention in Greek tragedy is one of those things you learn about in school without ever really understanding?like the mechanics of meter. You can study the rules of scansion year after year without having the smallest sense of how verse affects language. Then, one day, hearing them applied to everyday speech in a Mamet play, you see how it's all supposed to work:

Someone is against me that's their problem... I can look out for myself and I don't got to Fuck around behind somebody's back, I don't like the way they're treating me. (Or pray some brick safe falls and hits them On the head, they're walking down the street.) But to have that shithead turn, in one breath, Every sweet roll that I ever ate with them Into ground glass (I'm wondering were they Eating it and thinking "This guy's an idiot To blow a fucking quarter on his friends"...) ...This hurts me, Don. This hurts me in a way I don't know what the fuck to do. (Pause.)

I've reconfigured that speech (from American Buffalo) so that it looks like blank verse. What makes it poetry, though, are the tiny ways in which it deviates from how people really talk?the word order, the idiosyncratic emphasis, the words left out. It's something one could never appreciate without hearing a heightened version of an argot one spoke oneself every day.

We don't really know how Elizabethans spoke; consequently we can't experience Shakespeare the way verse-drama was meant to be heard. In the same way, because we never really see Greek tragedy as it was meant to be experienced, the rules of that form remain obscure to us. It wasn't until just a few years ago, watching a performance of The Heiress at Lincoln Center, that I had an inkling of what the three-actor convention in tragedy was about. It was The Heiress, for God's sake?a third-rate period melodrama; but there were all these three-way scenes where everyone disagreed yet everyone was right.

Contrary to popular belief, Greek tragedies didn't always have to end badly. They didn't even have to be sad. A lot of them were?like the 14 we have by Aeschylus and Sophocles (seven a piece)?but until the fourth century, when comedy was invented, the word tragedy just meant any sort of play. Euripides wrote tragedies (like the Alcestis and the Helen) that we might properly regard as melodrama, comic or romantic. Of course, there is the rule about tragedy having to be about something that's happened in the far-off distant past, but Aeschylus' The Persians, while a flop (and perhaps for that reason) was about events within living memory.

Actually, you could argue that World War II is the long-ago offstage incident (comparable, say, to the murder of Laius) which if it doesn't create the situation makes it a problem. "Munich" and the specter of "appeasement" are what everyone keeps talking about. They're what set the President at odds with his generals and create the conflict between seeming and being.

One wants to seem strong; on the other hand, one doesn't want to start World War III. Back and forth the pendulum swings between public and private, scene after scene played out in that circular space (the Oval Office) dominated by that altar-like desk. Sometimes the two Kennedys and O'Donnell retreat to comment on how a confrontation with the generals has gone. Sometimes we get the military commenting on the Kennedys. What's gripping is our dawning realization that the enemy within is much more frightening than the enemy without. It's also fascinating to watch it dawn on a bunch of guys who are playing poker that their opponents are playing chess.

Chess is about timing and material. But half of poker is theater; and theater is what's being made in Thirteen Days. It's in the stipulation that Kennedy not do anything to change his schedule; it's in the repeated instructions to the pilots preparing to fly over Cuba that, "whatever happens," they not get shot at; it's in the very idea of the blockade itself.

"Get out of our way, Mr. Secretary," barks the admiral to Dylan Baker in that climactic scene. "The Navy has been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones!" To which Baker replies, apoplectically: "You don't understand a thing! This is language?a new vocabulary the likes of which the world has never seen." It was; and a mere two years later Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern would be satirizing it brilliantly. Like the language of theater, it was essentially about nothing.

It's one of the graces of the film that even in that sublime moment Baker isn't allowed to seem heroic. (His timing is a little off, like that of a real person caught in an impromptu face-off.) There are no heroes in this movie?or rather, the idea of heroism is being cut down to size, shown in real-life proportions. The only heroism is in the acting: it's all self-effacing, if not downright disfiguring, and compounded by unforgiving lighting and makeup; everyone, from Costner on down to little Janet, is almost unrecognizable: Frank Wood, Lucinda Jenney, Kevin Conway, Len Cariou, Tim Jerome.

And does it glorify the Kennedys? You bet it does. It also makes you realize that not all propaganda is necessarily reprehensible. What the movie seems to idealize and make us nostalgic for is something decent that's gone out of political life, the idea of ideas, the image of men who are capable of conscience, thought and reasoning, humor, self-doubt, even self-respect, men who seem fit to govern because they don't seem to see themselves as bigger than life. Whether such men ever really existed is immaterial: it's an ideal.

I don't know if it was Janet or someone else who remarked that if the makers of Thirteen Days had released the movie in October rather than December we would have had a different election. I'm not sure that's true. I think if we'd had this panoply of thoughtful, capable statesmen to feast our eyes on, those of us who voted for Nader or the late Pat Paulsen would probably just have stayed home.