Free YouTube Movie Reviews: 13 Days (2000)

Free for streaming right now (with commercials) is 13 Days, a 145 minute feature film based on the actual facts of the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and starring Kevin Costner as Kevin O'Donnell, one of the key figures in the Kennedy administration at that time, and Bruce Greenwood (who? yeah, he's one of those guys) as John F. Kennedy. 

This film is essentially a workplace drama. It's just that the workplace happens to be the White House in the Fall of 1962 and the "work" involved dispatching fighter jets and calling the captains of naval destroyers who have their fingers on the triggers of torpedos. 

If nothing else, this film reached peak levels of "middle aged white men in suits arguing" and -- unless I'm missing something -- was peak "Kennedy administration feature film era." If there has been another significant one since, I'm not aware of it. In my mind, September 11th, 2001 closed the book on that particular chapter of American Grief and ushered in a whole new one. If they had waited another year to make this film, I doubt they could have gotten done and it would have ended up a TV mini-series or something. 

What this film does very well is show how the Geo-Political sausage is made (or at least, how it was made back then), as the highest government officials and military leaders sit or stand in conference room after conference room arguing who and when to bomb, or whether to use diplomacy to solve the problem of an imminent weapons build up in Cuba. Kennedy is portrayed as a liberal peace-maker who wants to use any possible means other than violence and war to solve the problem, while he is virtually surround by a pack of old, grizzled war-hungry generals. 

Anyone who knows the story of the embattled and short-lived Kennedy administration, and is familiar with all the conspiracy theories about his assassination, will fully understand this story already and know why at times it's so cringe-worthy. Just about one year later, he would be dead, and almost immediately after that the grizzled generals depicted in those rooms would escalate the U.S.'s Vietnam operations -- which Kennedy had been trying to wind-down -- into a full-scale war and we all know what happened there. 

 To me that's really the underlying point of 13 Days. Yes, the Cuban missile crisis was an extremely tense moment for the U.S. and the world, in which we stood on the brink of all-out nuclear war, even if we may have pushed ourselves to the brink out of fear and itchy trigger fingers. But the broader message is that Kennedy was beset on all sides by forces that wanted to counteract his instincts, and though he came through the Cuban Missile Crisis okay, he was still doomed. 

This is a good, solid film but it won't be for everyone. Some of the military action scenes keep this from being a completely office-bound Mad Men-esque workplace drama (minus any of the sex). And if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty of the JFK administration -- there are likely to be fewer and fewer of us each year -- then you'll not need to watch this. If I had one major complaint it would be that they should have cast a bigger name star in the role of JFK, and maybe even of RFK. If you're going to have Kevin Costner on screen for 85% of the movie, you need someone with a better "face" and more acting chops than Bruce Greenwood to handle the job of being the president. No offense to Greenwood's fine acting performance, but it's like a bulldog and a chihuahua in a fight. The supporting cast is so middling that it occasionally felt like Kevin Costner found himself plopped in the middle of a made for TV movie.