DVD: The Unknown Known

Early in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s first, Oscar-winning documentary about a former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara admits that, if the USA had lost World War Two, he would have been convicted as a war criminal for his part in the fire-bombing of Japan. “Some things work out, and some things don’t,” Donald Rumsfeld observes with contrasting breeziness in Morris’s new film.

The cunning and humane Morris, who spent 33 hours interviewing Rumsfeld, only presses his subject once, on the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. That “didn’t create injuries that were permanent,” Rumsfeld responds. This dismissive failure of sympathetic imagination may be the main flaw lurking beneath his avalanche of folksy, combative and hollow words here. Later, he chokes up as he tells a sentimental anecdote about a soldier who survived the war. He shows no interest in the bloody reality of the thousands who didn’t.

This feels unusually unsatisfactory for a Morris film. There is no pay-off. Just a grinning, impregnable fool talking, interspersed with reminders of his astonishing durability at the heart of American power (Rumsfeld was Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, too), and footage of the camera panning across placid blue water. The director hopes this coheres into a true picture of a man he calls “the quintessential Errol Morris character”: a Secretary of self-defence and self-deception, who never delves beneath the surface of his own ideas, handed the power to start terrible wars.

The extras include a commentary and on-stage Q&A from Morris, essential in a film which has some of its subject’s opaqueness. The incisively thoughtful director teases out meanings which are anything but clear while listening to his aggressively blank interviewee.