I was excited to watch a film about Vietnam, but bored watching it. The title Last Days in Vietnam promises a complex canvas, but director Rory Kennedy delivers a dismayingly shallow, small-focus film. A bit of navel-gazing, really, by a handpicked handful of government employees who, 40 years ago, administered a fiasco. They let themselves off gently with a bit of on-camera mea culpa, or "my bad." This moral idiocy, which, uncorrected, would ultimately spawn the "War on Terror," is on view starting Friday at the Opera Plaza Cinema.
With the notable exception of brilliant British documentarist Adam Curtis, nobody dares narrate a non-fiction film these days. No filmmaker wants to be caught dead stating an opinion. Maybe they don't actually know what or how to think. So, usually, a bunch of talking heads are stitched together in a crazy-quilt montage, with the narrative in the mind of the beholder. Stock footage and musical interludes complement or contradict the blah-blah, adding depth, irony, or intrigue �" if you're lucky.
The de facto narrator of Last Days is CIA analyst Frank Snepp, a rugged guy with snowy hair cut short, who uses simple words and semaphore facial expressions to avoid telling the camera, the world, the director, you, or me what he knows. Because if he was where he says he was, he knows things. But Rory, there's no point interviewing Frank Snepp about Vietnam if you can't get him to say anything interesting. And really, letting him narrate your film for you suggests you're a U.S. government apologist pretending to make an indie film.
The first third of Last Day tells us that the Paris Peace Accord was signed in January 1973, covering a ceasefire between the Communist North and the Americanized South, and a withdrawal of U.S. troops. There's President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger creepily lisping. It's very hard to watch the vile vampire Kissinger in hornrims smiling as he mimics a human being. There's zero context for U.S. foreign policy in general, or Kissinger's reign in particular. Not one political analyst or journalist participates onscreen.
In August 1974, Nixon was impeached for burglarizing the opposition's offices in the Watergate Hotel. The departure of the crazy warmonger from Whittier emboldened the Communist North. In April 1975, the South Vietnamese capital Saigon was a sitting duck. Everything U.S. taxpayers' dollars had paid for was about to be flushed spectacularly down the toilet. Here's where the story begins, 30 minutes in, but it never gets very far, wide, or deep, because director Kennedy doesn't scratch the surface.
There were 5,000 Americans in South Vietnam, with Vietnamese "wives and girlfriends" who wanted to get the hell out before the Communists started the inevitable process of exterminating collaborators. We're told there was no evacuation plan. Did the U.S. never contemplate defeat? Did it never consider the people of South Vietnam to be human? The lack of foresight is staggering. The indifference to the suffering, not of the putative enemy in the North, but the putative friend in the South, is sociopathic. If you're looking for answers to these appalling conundrums, look elsewhere.
Last Days gathers self-serving anecdotes about a botched evacuation from the ubiquitous Snepp and a few army and navy mouthpieces who will tell a consistent story without lapsing into remorse or insight. The only wrinkle in the film is the bitterness directed at Ambassador Graham Martin, a dignified old-school diplomat saddled with the least desirable posting in the world. CIA mastermind Snepp has the chutzpah to pretend it was somehow the Ambassador's fault that more of the native population wasn't saved. Kennedy gives Snepp the soapbox, and there's no one to contradict him.
I don't know why Kennedy made this film, which barely functions as a film. There are four kinds of images: talking heads, stock footage of South Vietnamese crowds, animated maps, and a computer model of the U.S. Embassy from every possible external angle except the earthworm's. None of these visuals is remotely engaging in any way. The soundtrack music by Gary Lionelli is brooding cellos hovering on the brink of a thematic statement that never arrives.
Maybe the boredom inherent to Last Days is indicative of a generalized inability to face what we did to Vietnam and ourselves by shipping tons of materiel and soldiers, spies, contractors, diplomats over there, and bombing and terrorizing peasants for a while, and then leaving. The alternative to boredom is questioning the official version, expressing pain, releasing secrets, and grieving the dead. But if we actually dealt with Vietnam, we'd be forced to stop repeating it.
Opens Friday at Opera Plaza Cinemas in SF, Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, and Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.