Daniel Ellsberg narrates this documentary about his challenge to the Nixon administration's escalation of the Vietnam War. In an anecdote, he asks why a man does anything. "Because of a girl." It was "because of a girl," his future wife Patricia, that Ellsberg attended his first anti-war rally in 1969 while working at the RAND Corporation on top secret documents stating in black and white that the administration knew the war could not be won and that saving face for America was a higher priority than the loss of lives on both sides. Ellsberg, a handsome Vietnam vet, decided to release these papers to the public, at the risk of a long jail sentence. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is the one who called Ellsberg the title of the movie. Nixon swears in a lot of the recordings, which made me giggle, as we are old enough to remember his presidency.
The full-length feature, produced by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith and based in part on Ellsberg's 2002 memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, leaves out the fact that he was married to someone else for a while after Patricia broke up with him, and that the kids in the movie are the first wife's. We do learn that Patricia took him back and married him when she believed that Ellsberg had become as truly anti-war as she was. One other bit of trivia: Jack noticed that the illustrations of the Karmann Ghia (car) showed the trunk in the back. The trunk was in the front of that model, just like the VW bug.
Despite that, the documentary, nominated for an Oscar, is entertaining and fast moving, with lots of archival film, re-creations, the subject's narration (he will be 79 in April), some animated sequences, and good music by Blake Leyh.
No comments:
Post a Comment