Movie Review: The Unknown Known

Movie Review: The Unknown Known

The Big Takeaway: Donald Rumsfeld narrates a documentary on his life in public office.

The Little Takeaway: A waste of time. The two men participating in a masturbatory game of “cat-and-also-cat” is never going to make as compelling a documentary as they think. This movie will please no one with any political bent.

At the end of the movie Donald Rumsfeld flatly says “I think you’re chasing the wrong rabbit.” And he’s right. I suppose director Errol Morris thought he might have something when he got Rumsfeld to agree to sit down and chat about his life, both private and public. To be fair, the first half-hour or so of the movie is indeed interesting, if not a little bit flat and uninformative as to how his circumstances developed Rumsfeld as a person. But that’s fine, you find Rumsfeld himself to be engaging and fun. As the film wears on, however, you begin to see just how utterly false, condescending and a tad horrifying that same posture becomes.

Immediately for me, as is no surprise, Rumsfeld reminded me of all the things I absolutely loathed about the Bush administration. The Frank Lutz-tization of vocabulary (it’s not torture it’s “advanced interrogation tactics” for example), that somehow people were making decisions but no one was taking theme blame. The sinister incompetence that seemed to infest the entire administration is on display in this film in fits and bursts. If you didn’t love the Bush years, this movie isn’t going to change your mind one bit.

But what if you’re one of those conservatives that thought W. was just one of the greatest presidents ever? Well, you’ll find nothing here really either. Rumsfeld himself seems uninterested in celebrating anything he did as secretary of defense, and rightfully so. All he really do was execute our nation getting in to two needles wars. Time and time again he repeats that history will ultimately decide if the administrations actions in Iraq and Afghanistan were wise. In addition to that, I don’t think we’ll need THAT much time to know what an utter failure the Bush administration was.

For a man that was so effusive with memo writing Rumsfeld doesn’t say much. The film time and time again touches on this notion of these myriad of memos resembling a blizzard. As the memos came be known as “snowflakes”. It’s through these memos that the bulk of the narrative heft is laid. You find out how Rumsfeld ran the Pentagon, how he dealt with his peers, and so on. He also narrates these memos, but never elucidates on them, believing them to speak for themselves.

Therein lies the problem: a documentary is only as good as the topic its covering. Rumsfeld is a shitty topic, and therefore the movie suffers for it. It’s not a bad film, per se, but by hanging it’s hat on Rumsfeld, it falls way short of anything approaching a compelling documentary. It’s just masturbatory and you get the notion that Morris thinks he’s doing more than what appears on the screen.

But you’d be hard pressed to find either Morris or Rumsfeld disagreeing with that notion. From time to time in the movie you can hear Morris’ voice pipe up with incredulity at something Rumsfeld says, or asking him to expound on something. He does the old trick of having the interviewee say something, then contradicting it with facts or figures to the contrary. And this being Rumsfeld, there is plenty of material. You have to wonder if it's a conscious choice on the part of Morris, or he just had so little to go on from Rumsfeld, he had to pad out the movie with this cliche garbage.

You get the idea that Morris thinks he’s playing a game of cat-and-mouse with Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld is masterful at this kind of bullshit. The only time he shows any emotion is when he relates the story of visiting a soldier clinging to life at Walter Reed. He get teary-eyed, and that’s about it. The rest of the movie’s running time is Rumsfeld and his toothy-grin dodging questions and passing blame around to anyone else but himself.

It’s clear that Rumsfeld is doing a bit of legacy clean-up, which is why he chose to do this movie. On top of that you can palpably feel the arrogance and narcissism dictating that he do this film as well. But for all the effusiveness of the memos, his presence in the film doesn’t reconcile with that, so you’re obligated to go with what is already known about the man from his years in office. In fact, I would be surprised, stemming from this  if other members of the Bush Administration pop up and start doing a little chatting of their own, “correcting” the record.

The Unknown Known is a shitty documentary about a shitty man’s time in power. Even the title tips its hat to a perceived cleverness that just doesn’t exist in the movie itself. Men who have held great power are always going to come out of the woodwork and try to galvanize their legacy. It takes even greater men to humble them and show us how mortal they really are and have paved the road to their legacy with a great many mistakes. It’s going to take a lot more than Errol Morris’ cheeky barbs to clip Rumsfeld’s wings.

Final Verdict: Pass!