A TV movie about President Lyndon B. Johnson? A historical drama about his "suffering" during the Vietnam war escalation? Intriguing idea, like its attempt of resurrecting from the dust of last century the climate which generated Johnson's Great Society political project... A vision that failed, even if the movie closes celebrating its persistence before the end titles. More than everything else, this is a stage drama unlikely to stand the real, terrifying drama going on outside the "halls of power" -- namely, in the bombarded and famished country of Vietnam. In the face of such a massacre (of both Americans and Vietnamese), when we are told that some 58,000 marines and TWO MILLION Asiatics died in the last four years of the war only, there is no drawing room drama that can give justice to the "mess". This was no simple "mess", it was a genocide -- something one would have thought belonging to a bloodier, more cruel past, like a new extermination of Jews. Here, the "Jews" were the Communists from South-East Asia: Vietcong, women, oldsters & children alike. America lost much more than a bloody war in Vietnam; the film partially tries to show that (like in the impressive suicide scene of a man who burns alive under the very eyes of Robert McNamara at the Pentagon), but generally speaking "Path to War" remains more interested in the affairs going on between the male trio of its protagonists: LBJ, "Bob" McNamara (whose wife had ulcer, we learn) and Clark Clifford, the man who succeeded McNamara as Secretary of Defence (a marvelously saturnine Donald Sutherland). I realize this is a historical film tailored to suit American audiences: it's just as right that they ask questions about their past and the more controversial figures of their political life; but I can assure you that, when screened outside the U.S., the film looks more like the capable drawing room caper which I mentioned before, no matter if THIS drawing room is Oval and located at the White House. All this taken into account, it's a standing tribute to its director, John Frankenheimer, and to its leading players that the film "per se" succeeds in capturing our attention and sustaining it through 165 minutes of dialogue and interior sequences, like no ordinary TV movie would be even remotely capable of doing these days. It is, in just one word, a mature conception of a historical movie, sustained by brilliant performances ands a good screenplay... The real shame is that too many of us (especially the non-Americans?) best remember LBJ through the devastating portrait Jules Feiffer made of those years in its cartoons. Forty years later, Frankenheimer gives us a different thing to muse about: we accept it from his "maestro" hands -- with just a little reserve in the back of our minds.
Review of Path to War
