The title of Thirteen Days, which is about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is stolen from Robert F Kennedy’s book on the subject, though it does not purport to be an adaptation of it. RFK’s is just one of 24 books mentioned in the bibliography given in the press release.
You know when a movie’s press release has a bibliography that it is taking itself very seriously. Indeed, the press release goes on about how then-president John F Kennedy’s desk was painstakingly recreated for the movie, how the curved couches and the wall sconces of the Oval Office were reconstructed, and how even the presidential bed was remade to the precise recorded specifications — not that one sees it in the movie.
The bed could have been put to good use had the filmmakers gone all the way in their quest for authenticity and shown us some of JFK’s legendarily full sex life. He was a bit like Julius Caesar, who had concubines on call in case they were needed — to relieve his tension, of course, and to allow him to concentrate on matters of state, JFK did say he needed to have sex once a day, and many a starlet or aide was happy to oblige.
But I suppose you can’t cover everything. In October 1962 American spy planes spotted missile sites being developed in Cuba; the missiles were being delivered by the Soviet Union, and were obviously a considerable threat to United States security.
The game of brinkmanship that followed brought the world to the edge of nuclear war: as Thirteen Days shows, the US military chiefs were practically gagging to start bombing Cuba, which might well have led to a nuclear attack on the US by the Soviets, and thus a counterattack. Millions would have died.
It was up to JFK (portrayed here by Bruce Greenwood) to restrain the dogs of war. They keep saying things like “Appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive” and “The Soviet understands only one thing — action”. The film makes out that Kennedy’s reluctance to take a more aggressive line was primarily humanistic, which may well have been the case — after all, we do see him, as he is deliberating, looking out the window at his family playing in the garden, which strikes a sentimental note and reminds us of what was at stake. But the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs, the previous year’s failed invasion of Cuba in which the CIA was involved, must have played more of a part in his reasoning than the film allows.
The events of Thirteen Days are focused through the persona of Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner), a close friend and adviser of the Kennedys. The filmmakers hope that this provides us with an Everyman’s perspective on the crisis, and it does work, insofar as a White House insider (said to have been the most powerful man in the presidency after the Kennedys) can be said to be an Everyman.
The film is tense, what with all the eyeball-to-eyeballing, the manoeuvres to prevent giving the Pentagon brass an excuse to start bombing, the briefings and debriefings. The music is ominous right from the start, so we know something serious is going on — and Costner keeps his brow pretty furrowed all the way through. There is a lot of drinking, though surprisingly little smoking. An anachronistic lapse in the period detail?
Nowadays it seems almost inconceivable that Kennedy couldn’t just get on the phone to Nikita Kruschev and cut some kind of deal, but it was the Cold War, after all, and the Soviets were regarded as practically an alien species. It’s a pity that we don’t get to see what the crisis was like from the Soviet end as well, but that would have doubled the length of the movie.
By comparison with that other recent historical (melo)drama, Pearl Harbor, Thirteen Days is scrupulously accurate and commendably intelligent, conveying very well the almost claustrophobic urgency of the situation. It is, inevitably, a very talky film, with little in the way of visual excitement to offer, though the filmmakers do swing the camera about now and again to jazz things up a bit. It is absorbing, but it is so unremittingly serious that you do begin to wish they’d made space for some of those Kennedy concubines.