Two political documentaries about empty-suit Republicans. Why make a documentary about Donald Rumsfeld? Why make a movie about Mitt Romney? Why two of the least interesting men in America? The reality is that these two might be so insanely white-bread that they’re bizarrely fascinating…BUT that’s not what happens. In both cases, you get the sense that the filmmakers didn’t want to really press their subjects, perhaps out of wariness of being painted as liberal media figures.
The Unknown Known…Academy Award winning documentarian Errol Morris specializes in pushing out stubborn truths—his documentary “The Thin Blue Line” freed a wrongfully convicted cop killer from death row, and his “The Fog of War” finally got Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to give candid thoughts about how mistaken the Vietnam War really was. So it makes total sense that he’d try to get professional weasel Donald Rumsfeld to do the same thing for Iraq.
But no such thing happens. Rumsfeld comes across less as a former Secretary of Defense than as the head suit of a third-world dictator’s public relations firm. He doesn’t answer anything with any form of clarity, and you come across knowing less than you did before he opened his mouth. Morris must have realized this (he comes across as fairly soft on him) and that’s why his documentary shifts to focusing on Rumsfeld’s language. Plenty of time is given to the way Rumsfeld focuses on the preciseness of words (there must be a dozen references to Rumsfeld looking up the exact definition of a word), but using that precision to make things murkier. “The Unknown Known” shows how corrupt regimes play with language like fascist confetti, and just how little substance there is behind Rumsfeld’s relentless smile. Still, that is a more interesting thesis than a satisfying film. Grade: B-
Mitt…This documentary is a lot more sympathetic to Romney, and I’d heard over and over that it shows you a “different side” of “the man you only think you know.” Sadly, that’s not really true. Most of the scenes are of Romney talking campaign strategy with his family—-a frontier-esque collection of five sons and their wives, and some grandkids—-and it really just paints the picture of a guy who’s always “on.” [Sure, he’s sitting there eating pizza with his family, but it comes across as background noise while he talks about electoral votes.] It doesn’t dig deep enough into who he really is, and you get the sense that that’s just the way he likes it. The lone vulnerable moment in Romney’s armor seems to come at the exact moment he realizes he’s lost the presidency but it seems more like the shock of the century than a genuinely human moment. A better doc might have asked why he was so confident when there was never a moment he was ahead in the electoral projections? This isn’t that documentary. Grade: C