The morning after seeing Thirteen Days, I rang my friend Janet Coleman first thing. There were things I wanted to ask her about Roger Donaldson’s elegant docudrama on the Cuban missile crisis—like what she thought the impulse behind the movie had been, and whether she’d noticed how much like a play it was, and how faithful she reckoned it was to actual events, 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—for about three seconds—as 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, 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 Kennedy brothers Jack and Bobby.
Costner actually has comparatively little screen time. The character he plays isn’t even a sidekick so much as an errand-boy for the Kennedys, and nothing he does is heroic. 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,” surely, than they have ever before been invested with.
But Costner isn’t even giving his “love me because I’m such a loser” 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) he has chosen to be one of a company of extraordinary actors—both New York stage veterans and virtual unknowns—in a genuine ensemble piece. Costner is in the background a lot of the time. 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 just shy of being 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, presentation, and something like 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.
I haven’t done a thing to that speech (from American Buffalo) except to reconfigure it so as to look the way we’re used to seeing blank verse printed. Because that’s what it is: iambic pentameter. 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 ellipses, and left-out words. Presumably, when Elizabethan audiences went to a Shakespeare play what they heard was also a heightened version of the argot one spoke oneself every day.
We can’t experience Shakespeare the way a contemporary audience experienced verse-drama, because we don’t really know how Elizabethans spoke. In the same way, the rules of Greek tragedy remain obscure to us. I actually majored in Ancient Greek and plowed through a whole bunch of Sophocles and Euripides in graduate school, but I think the first glimmer of understanding of the three-actor convention I ever had came to me in the middle of a performance of The Heiress at Lincoln Center. It had something to do with a succession of three-way scenes in which everyone disagreed yet everyone was right.
Greek tragedies didn’t all end badly. They didn’t even have to be sad. A lot of them were; but until around the fourth century B.C. “tragedy” just meant any sort of play. Euripides wrote plays (like the Alcestis and the Helen) that we might properly regard as melodramas, comedies, or romances. Even the “rule” that tragedy depict events in a mythological or far-distant past wasn’t written in stone: Aeschylus’s Persians takes place after the Battle of Salamis, less than a decade before Pericles produced it in 472 B.C.
You could, if you wanted to, argue that World War II is the long-ago offstage incident which if it doesn’t actually create the situation in Thirteen Days makes that situation a problem. “Munich” and the specter of “appeasement” are what everyone keeps talking about. They are what set the President at odds with his generals. They are also what create the classic theatrical 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, as scene after scene is played out in a circular space (the Oval Office) dominated by that altar-like desk. Sometimes O’Donnell and the two Kennedys withdraw 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 think they are playing poker that their opponents are playing chess.
Chess is about timing and material. Poker is partly about theater; and theater is what’s being made in Thirteen Days. It’s inherent in the stipulation that Kennedy not do anything to change his schedule; it’s inherent in the repeated instructions to the pilots about to fly over Cuba that “whatever happens” they must not get shot at. Theater is in the very idea of the blockade itself.
“Get out of our way, Mr. Secretary,” an admiral barks at Dylan Baker in that rather swell climactic scene. “The Navy has been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones!” To which Baker, apoplectic, replies: “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 in Dr. Strangelove.) 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. (The timing of the character he plays 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 that we’ve lost.