A smart games-theory thriller

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2002)

There's not a lot wrong with this film, and what IS wrong is, so to speak, quarantined - it's all somehow connected to Kevin Costner. It's Costner whose tin ear prevents him from adopting a convincing Boston accent. (I didn't know it was meant to be a Boston accent - I had to ask an American - and I still don't have a clear idea of what a Boston accent is meant to sound like, but I know phoney when I hear it.) It's Costner whose greeting-card musings about sunsets jar with the intelligence elsewhere. It's Costner whose family we're forced to watch. The actors who play his wife and children faced a thankless task - they must have known that they were only accessories, to be paraded in front of the camera for no better reason than to let us know that Costner's character HAD a family ... what kind, who constituted it, what they felt about him and what he felt about them didn't matter; all that mattered was that the family be there, so we'd know that Costner wasn't one of those shifty single types. I don't know what prompted the director to show us the family itself rather than a photograph of it. An indefinable sense of duty, perhaps.
The story of the Cuban missile crisis is as tense as almost any other, and, Costner-related lapses aside, the film sticks to the story and understands what it is that makes it tense and exciting. (We even get a clear idea of the pressures that Kruschev would have felt, even though the action never leaves the Americas.) So absorbing is "Thirteen Days" that, although I saw it within 48 hours of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers (the shock waves were of course felt over here, too), I didn't think of current events once. If I had I would have been struck by the differences. The Russians placing missiles in Cuba was, of itself, harmless: the danger lay in what the action MEANT. The terrorist attack was of itself horrific, but it meaningless, which mean's there's no real story to tell (except perhaps the subsequent one of a president so dazzled by the idea of revenge that he was willing to turn an extradition dispute - an extradition dispute! - into a war). Watching "Thirteen Days" it seems as though the story was just THERE, waiting to be told ... that the people making the film might have ruined it if they'd been stupid enough but didn't have to do very much in order to tell it successfully. This is probably false. But the fact that we get this impression shows how successful the film is.