Rationality will not save us: Errol Morris pursues McNamara into the Fog.

• Author: Esther, John
• Position: The Fog of War - Movie Review

As George Bush sets the United States on a course of multiple invasions, Errol Morris's The Fog of War, nominated for an Academy Award, could not have come at a more important time.

The film deals with the bombings of nearly one million Japanese civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nearer-than-you-think nuclear war the United States almost had with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the machinations behind the invasion of Vietnam seen through the eyes of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

"I would hope the movie would have some kind of influence, that it will call attention to the fact that these things in some similar form had happened in the past. And maybe we should pay attention to that fact," says Morris in a recent interview.

Morris is being modest. People who have paid attention to documentaries over the past twenty years know who Morris is and what kind of impact his films can have.

An investigative reporter-turned-filmmaker, Morris made his first film, Gates of Heaven, a hilarious spoof looking at how Americans relate to death vis-a-vis pet cemeteries. It became an instant success with critics.

His second effort, about the inhabitants of a small town in Florida who lop off their limbs for insurance money ("They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially," Morris says), ran into some problems when his subjects allegedly threatened to kill him. So Morris reworked the documentary and called it Vernon, Florida (1981).

In 1988, Morris left the jokes aside and made The Thin Blue Line, a film that led to the overturned conviction of death row inmate Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood.

In 1992, Morris brought physicist Stephen Hawking to a mass audience with A Brief History of Time.

Then came Morris's quirky 1997 film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which sparked a temporary fascination with the African mole-rat. Legend has it that freaks, geeks, and kids looking for the underground rodents bombarded pet stores with phone calls.

Morris blended his humor with pathos in the brilliant Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 film that chronicles the career of a manufacturer of death penalty machinery who became a Holocaust revisionist. What emerges in Mr. Death is not some bloodthirsty thug but rather a thoroughly pathetic primate on two legs.

There is nothing so pathetic about The Fog of War.

It brings to light the...