Path to War (2002): More TV Than HBO

 

My whole life since I was an elementary school aged kid I’ve always been fascinated by US political history, often much more than I am modern politics (particularly these days where everything political is just crushingly depressing and scary). I make it a regular habit to read books about 19^th and 20^th century political figures and events, and I am an absolute sucker for the subgenre of “HBO Political History Movie/Miniseries” that was so common in the 00s and early 10s on the network (shoutout to the amazing John Adams series maybe someday I’ll review here). So of course when I somehow only found out that Path to War existed for the first time yesterday while browsing through stuff on Max, I didn’t even think about it and just immediately pulled the trigger to watch it.

First thing is first, I have heard many a bad attempt by British actors to do a convincing Southern accent like Jude Law a weird number of times, but Michael Gambon here trying to accomplish a convincing Texas accent is one of the absolute worst. He is normally a great actor, and outside of the accent he mostly gives a solid performance here, but they cast in him a role where he has to give multiple monologues (speeches) where all attention is drawn to his weird hybrid pronunciations of various words that totally take you out of the moment. Alec Baldwin is also prominently featured, and this is criticism I’m sure will be repeated in the future if you read other reviews of films with him in it I write, he basically just plays Alec Baldwin like he does in almost all of his roles. There’s no extra nuance or attempt to really capture some of the well documented mannerisms of Robert McNamara, he’s just playing it exactly as he plays most other roles. I don’t really like Alec Baldwin as an actor, if you can’t tell. Felicity Huffman is fine although her Texas accent isn’t very convincing either, but she is given so little to do but simply react to LBJ or do generic wifely things, that isn’t her fault of course though.

The film has a really soft focus, too bright, bland appearance, which I would just write off to shooting for television in the CRT era as a lot of shows of the late 90s and early 00s suffer the same problem but this is HBO in the early 2000s: there were a lot of great looking shows and movies on the network by then. They also change the film grain on scenes that heavily utilize stock footage so they match, bringing the film down to the stock footage’s level and it simply doesn’t work at all, it looks ugly and distracting and just draws attention to the fact that they cheaped out instead of even attempting a recreation of anything.

Some of the writing can be cringeworthy in how awkward they handle exposition dumps or hammer home corny patriotism or token moments of humanism, and one of the biggest problems is that the whole thing is designed to make you feel sympathy for LBJ and look at him as primarily the victim of bad advice more than bad judgement, only taking token moments here and there to remind him that he’s ultimately to blame for the decisions they portray him as being tortured over while they paint McNamara as the “Big Bad”. I think it is safe to say, a lot of people would dispute this version of events as being simplistic and much too kind to LBJ so I take some issue with it, even if they do sprinkle in the odd scene to remind you he was a vindictive prick at times.

There is good here though. John Frankenheimer, who had directed some excellent films in previous decades and at this point was a veteran of HBO, does a solid job directing outside of the above criticism, shots are framed in interesting ways throughout to distract from the fact that the film is primarily a series of meetings in white rooms, and the camera stays on the move more than you’d think for such a procedural film. For something that is nearly three hours long, it rarely plods and I stayed pretty engaged with it the entire time, and some of that is because at times they really hit their stride at analyzing the decision making process but the biggest reason for that is the supporting cast that includes Donald Sutherland blowing away the rest of the cast with the exception of Bruce McGill out of the water with his great performance as future Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, character actor great McGill getting a rare chance to really shine with a meaty role, 90s indie favorite and future Gilmore Girls actor Chris Eigeman giving a solid performance as Bill Moyers, and a number of other really good character actors of that age. Even Gary Sinise shows up for a cameo reprising his role of George Wallace from another Frankenheimer TV movie a number of years before, and he does a good job too.

Ultimately, it is okay. I totally understand why I didn’t know this was a thing until now and that it wasn’t one of those HBO movies that became considered an instant classic. It takes some specific stances bound to be controversial among some, is well directed but overall looks very TV more than HBO even for its era, and is centered around a couple “meh” performances although the rest of the cast can be pretty great at times. It is watchable and I didn’t regret spending that time giving it a shot without any hesitation, but I’m pretty sure I’m never going to feel tempted to watch it a second time. Watch it, but don’t expect the world.