Film Review

John Frankenheimer, who died suddenly in July 2002, was best known for his political films of the early 1960s. Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) became central documents of the emerging culture of American paranoia, making Frankenheimer the Oliver Stone of his time. Having created a fictional White House in 1964 for Seven Days in May, it was fitting that Frankenheimer direct a film about the actual White House of the era and the process by which President Lyndon Johnson committed the United States to the Vietnam War. Devotees of paranoia, hypnotized assassins, and crazed generals will be disappointed by Path to War, as it avoids Stoneian detours into speculation and sticks to a meticulously documented script by Daniel Giat. What the result lacks in pace it makes up for in integrity.

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During the 1990s, Frankenheimer directed a series of highly acclaimed television films on historical themes including Against the Wall (1994), on the Attica Prison rising of 1971, and George Wallace (1997) for HBO, and the Civil War film Andersonville (1996) for Turner Broadcasting. Path to War follows in this tradition, charting the progress of Lyndon Johnson (played by the British actor Michael Gambon) from his election in November 1964, through the key policy discussions by which the United States became committed to the Vietnam War, to the moment in March 1968 when Johnson quit the presidential race and announced his determination to sue for peace. This timeframe excludes decisions taken during the Kennedy years and Johnson's manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but there is still plenty to tell. The film emphasizes the parallel course of Johnson's "Great Society" programs, and it underlines the degree to which these programs were casualties of his obsession with the war. The debate over U.S. policy in Vietnam eddies between the pro-escalation Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin), the Cassandra-like Undersecretary of State George Ball (Bruce McGill), and the sometime-dove advisor Clark Clifford (Donald Sutherland). True to the events, it is hard to determine the point of no return. Johnson's team are shown to spend their whole war fine tuning: talking about "light at the end of the tunnel" and the one extra notch in escalation that will bring Ho Chi Minh to heel. Everett Dirkson (Philip Baker Hall) calls it "going to war in inches."

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