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Thirteen Days film review
THIRTEEN DAYS
Running time: 146 mins
Starring: Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp, Dylan Baker, Michael Fairman
Forty years ago the world came perilously close to a nuclear showdown as the cold war threatened to heat up in a hurry when the Russians established missile bases in Cuba. Thirteen Days is a fascinating and chilling reminder of the period in 1962 when John F. Kennedy held America's, and the world's, fate in his hands as he dealt with what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The unfolding drama is seen through the eyes of Kennedy's special assistant Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) who as a long time family friend had unparalled access to the president.
The film opens with clips of an atomic mushroom cloud to establish, for those too young to remember, exactly what was at stake. When a U2 plane comes back from a routine flight over Cuba with photographs of newly established Russian rocket launching sites, America's president and military leaders are notified to determine their course of action. Time is of the essence as every day that passes brings the missiles closer to being operational and capable of launching a first strike against America.
The dilemma for Kennedy and his advisors was deciding on what course of action to take. A political approach to making the Russians withdraw might be time consuming whereas the military strategy of bombing the missile sites offered a short term solution that would inevitably lead to retaliation and an escalation which might ultimately lead to world war. It was a tough decision and one that Thirteen Days dramatises superbly with strong performances from Bruce Greenwood as the beleaguered JFK and Steven Culp as his attorney general brother Robert. The Kennedy's desire for a political and peaceful resolution is in stark contrast to the military leaders who consider the president weak and are still smarting from their unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs the year before.
It's difficult to authenticate everything in Thirteen Days. Screenwriter David Self has clearly inflated the importance of O'Connell's role, but he captured perfectly Kennedy's agony, his overbearing weight of responsibility and his indecision. The compelling aspect of Thirteen Days is that while the rest of the world looked on in nervous anticipation assuming the America government was in calm control of the situation and in full knowledge of the facts, the film shows that it was not a faceless institution, but real men confronted with an apocalyptic dilemma and no where else to turn. It shows their vulnerability, their egos, their genuine fear and how close we came to disaster.
The film focuses its attention more on the events, sparing little time on developing the characters. Costner is convincing enough, though his occasional attempt at a Boston accent is both distracting and unnecessary. In the end Thirteen Days is a well-crafted TV drama. Its appeal lies more in its historical fascination than any artistic merit director Roger Donaldson provides and, apart from its deification of JFK, it's good to see Hollywood refraining from rewriting history and sticking to the facts.
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