For those too young to remember, this event was the high-water mark of the Cold War -- the closest the U.S. and the Soviet Union ever came to launching nuclear weapons at each other and triggering all-out nuclear war. Facing the real possibility of this horror was so terrifying for both sides -- let alone the rest of the world -- that its memory unquestionably worked to restrain direct belligerence between the superpowers afterward. (In film terms it also presumably had the salutary effect of inspiring Stanley Kubrick to Dr. Strangelove.)
In Roger Donaldson's film version of the crisis, we see everything through the eyes of Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner), a member of John F. Kennedy's inner circle and certainly one of the least-familiar major players in the Kennedy White House. Virtually every other major character in the film -- Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk, Curtis LeMay, and many others -- is a familiar figure from the period.
On October 16, President Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) is informed that spy planes have photographed the Russians moving nuclear missiles into Cuba -- an act considered a direct threat to the U.S. This triggers a series of meetings among JFK's political and military advisers, including brother Bobby (Steven Culp), McGeorge Bundy (Frank Wood), Robert McNamara (Dylan Baker), Gen. Maxwell Taylor (Bill Smitrovich), Dean Rusk (Henry Strozier), Adlai Stevenson (Michael Fairman), Ted Sorenson (Tim Kelleher), Gen. Curtis LeMay (Kevin Conway), and Dean Acheson (Len Cariou), Secretary of State under President Truman. The Kennedys seem to regard both Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Walter Adrian) and press secretary Pierre Salinger (Kelly Connell) as buffoons who need to be kept out of the loop.
As presented here, what is most fascinating in the meetings -- which make up most of the film -- is the extent to which the situation is portrayed as an internal crisis as well as an international one. Kennedy's immediate inner circle, represented here as JFK, Bobby, and O'Donnell, is not merely trying to figure out the best strategy for dealing with Russian president Nikita Khrushchev; they spend at least as much time trying to deal with the different political factions among the advisers. It's so clear that the generals are eager to push the situation into nuclear war that JFK has to have O'Donnell sneak behind them to inform various lower-ranking military figures that they are not to act without direct authorization from the President.
And at one point even the inner circle gets tightened: JFK and Bobby hatch a scheme on their own behind O'Donnell's back, because they know he won't like it and don't want to hear his arguments. (It turns out to be a harebrained idea that makes the situation much worse.) When O'Donnell finally learns he's been circumvented and why, he lambastes Bobby with the most cutting insult -- "This idea is that fucking bad; it's something your father would have done!" -- in reference to Joe Kennedy's appeasement of Hitler prior to American involvement in World War II.
Any film re-creating well-known historical events faces a huge number of potential pitfalls, particularly when the two central figures -- JFK and Bobby -- are, in looks and manner, as well documented and familiar to most of the audience as the Kennedy brothers. In terms of sheer impersonation, Culp is more successful. Greenwood gives a nuanced performance that may be the film's best work, but at times his surface dissimilarities to JFK are jarring. He bears only a slight physical resemblance to the President; and his accent seems to go in and out. The most obvious example is when we hear him repeatedly say "Cuba" in meetings, rather than JFK's famous "Cuber" pronunciation; when it comes time to replicate Kennedy's most famous speech of that period, "Cuba" would have sounded false to anyone who was alive at the time, so Greenwood finally says "Cuber," which makes the problem only more apparent. Costner has the luxury of playing a figure of whom the public has no preconceptions, but his accent also is inconsistent. Indeed the star is never at his most convincing when not speaking in his natural manner.
Director Donaldson has always been better in his suspense-oriented films (No Way Out, Marie) than in his other works (Cocktail, The Bounty). In Thirteen Days he is never less than effective -- but that has its negative as well as its positive side. On the one hand, he keeps us worrying about the world coming to end, even though we already know it doesn't. On the other, in conveying a huge amount of historical information in less than two and a half hours, the efficiency of his direction renders the movie somewhat characterless, like a top-rank made-for-TV production. The occasional personal moments, mostly involving O'Donnell's family, are strictly pro forma and uninspired.
Nevertheless Thirteen Days is perfectly gripping for those old enough to remember the terror under which Washington, Moscow, and the rest of the world lived that month in 1962. But the international incident is now such ancient history that the emotional intensity may shock viewers too young ever to have experienced the sense of living on the edge of annihilation.
