A Four-Star Salute to Thirteen Days

By Teddy Durgin
I often take people with me to movie premieres who have specialized knowledge of the subject matter being depicted on screen.  For Thirteen Days, the new Cuban missile crisis thriller directed by Roger Donaldson, I asked my mother and father to come with me.  After all, they had lived through that tense period of the early 1960s, and I thought they'd be a good judge of the actors in the movie portraying such real-life characters as John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Pierre Salinger, and Robert McNamara.They gave the film and the actors high marks for authenticity. By the same token, I took them to see Jurassic Park a few years ago, and they assured me the dinosaurs were very much like the ones they remember from their youth.

I'm kidding!

Anyway, Thirteen Days is a top-notch Hollywood thriller that is surprisingly absorbing given the fact that ... well, we know the world didn't erupt into atomic Hellfire in October of 1962.  That is when the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union dared to play a high-stakes game of chicken over nuclear weapons that Russia had positioned in Cuba, just off the Florida coast.

At first glance, you would think the film is another vehicle for Kevin Costner to get his career back on track.  Until now, the former Oscar winner for Dances With Wolves hadn't made a great (or even a really good) film since JFK in 1991.  Costner dominates the first 10 to 15 minutes of "hirteen Days, not as one of the Kennedy brothers but as White House adviser Kenny O'Donnell.  O'Donnell was one of the frowned-upon Irish mafia that JFK brought with him from Massachusetts when he was elected to the Oval Office.  Costner is quite good in the role, even though his thick Boston accent comes dangerously close to sounding like Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons at times.

Costner is the film's star, but he wisely melts into the ensemble early in the movie.  O'Donnell gives the movie its through line. He is there at many important points during the crisis and even does some of Kennedy's dirty work.  Some of the film's more effective sequences has O'Donnell on the phone to Navy pilots, imploring them not to get shot down or even shot at during their reconnaissance flights over Cuba.  To do so, would certainly force the U.S. to retaliate.

As important as Costner's big-star presence is to the overall picture, the most vital bit of casting has to be the film's most important players: JFK and RFK.  Now, I didn't know Jack Kennedy. He wasn't a friend.  But I must say, Bruce Greenwood ... you, sir ARE Jack Kennedy.  Greenwood is a character actor I have admired for many years.  He was mesmerizing on the one season that UPN allowed Nowhere Man to air its paranoid plot of a man whose identity had been wiped out.  Roles in such other productions as Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and TV's St. Elsewhere and Knot's Landing only confirmed his underrated talent.

Finally, in Thirteen Days, Greenwood is given a chance to really STAR.  This is a performance, not an imitation.  Greenwood is most impressive in the film's quieter moments, when he has to internalize Kennedy's struggle.  Most films build up the tension to a climax.  The Cuban missile crisis ebbed and flowed.  There was a climax of tension just about every day.  Greenwood has to show both cool and fear, strength and weakness at the same time, often in the same moment.  It's a fantastic performance.

As RFK, Steven Culp is also up to the task.  Best known for his shifty CIA agent (is there any other?) on JAG, Culp bears the strongest physical resemblance to his real-life counterpart in Thirteen Days.  The actor makes Robert Kennedy, JFK's brother and attorney general in 1962, a bulldog political operative. When the military puts pressure on JFK for a first strike, it is RFK who channels much of his brother's anger and outrage.

The rest of the cast is made up of fine ensemble performers, all of whom bring their own level of believability to whatever Donaldson asks them to do.  Roughly 80 percent of the film takes place in the White House, with characters mouthing large bits of dialogue while seated around tables or behind desks.  It help to have actors like Dylan Baker, as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and Kevin Conway, as General Curtis LeMay, taking the dialogue and making it their own.  And kudos to screenwriter David Self for delivering a screenplay that has to work out essentially a 13-act play in both an orderly and entertaining fashion.  I guess he can claim the script was Self-written.  Huh? Huh?

Sorry.

I've said it before, I'll say it again.  I absolutely love movies that take me on the "inside."  With Thirteen Days, there are many moments where you feel you are truly there in the Kennedy White House, sitting in on strategy meetings and wading through press and military briefings.  Let's hope this period piece finds its way to young audiences and box office success.

Ask not what Thirteen Days can do for you, but what YOU can do for Thirteen Days!