3.5 stars out of 5
Remember that infamous footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein? Well, there’s no video evidence of it, but Rumsfeld also shook hands with my mom.
No, seriously. This was a handful of years ago, and my folks were at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (They volunteer there from time to time.) And my mom spots Donald Rumsfeld, standing all by himself. He looked like a nice old man to her, in his little plaid shirt. My dad didn’t want to say hello—they’re both Democrats from way back. But mom walked right over and, yup, shook his hand.
Seeing Errol Morris’s new documentary The Unknown Known (in theaters but also now available on iTunes and Amazon), that’s the impression of Donald Rumsfeld that I got too: a nice old man. Sometimes clueless, sometimes ruthless, certainly very different politics than me, but overall a pretty sharp and decent guy. We’re all just people, right?
Except here’s the problem. I got to see a free screening of the movie (thanks Liz!!), and there was a Q&A session with Morris afterwards. And a couple of things happened there. A grey-beardy-Lennon-glasses-deep-feeling type dude wanted to know why Morris let Rummy off so easy. Why didn’t he really rip into him?
Morris—a true menschy character if ever there was one—was annoyed by this line of questioning, and returned to it again and again. Must’ve struck a nerve. But he insisted that it wasn’t his job to tear somebody down. He wants to get somebody to talk. To present the story and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
That seemed totally reasonable to me. But then Morris kept talking. And talking, and talking. And it turns out he hates Donald Rumsfeld. He despises him! Donald Rumsfeld is a war criminal, for god’s sake!
Well, jeez, Mr. Morris, maybe you should’ve edited your movie just a wee bit differently to gently push me toward that conclusion. (Beardy’s already there, so don’t worry about him.)
At the very least, I did learn a lot from this movie. I’m of the age that I had no firsthand Rumsfeld experience from the Nixon and Ford eras. And in the Reagan years, he was just a name. So there is a lot of fascinating background here. And Morris makes a nice, subtle parallel between Rumsfeld’s Cold War demonization of the Russians and the later insistence that there were WMDs in Iraq. Morris catches Rumbo in several thorny contradictions but the old bird has been playing this game a long, long time—he does not crack.
Rumsfeld’s obsession/confusion with the English language becomes a humorous motif here. The man dictated a shitload of memos.
And there’s a nice score by Danny Elfman.
But there’s also so very much screen time of just Rumsfeld sitting there, talking. And I got pretty f-ing sleepy on a few different occasions.
I don’t know. Maybe Errol Morris should’ve interviewed my mom.
Jack Silbert, curator