It's all in the subtext (spoiler in final paragraph)

Rating: 5/10 (22 March 2001)

13 is an unlucky number. The Cuban Missile Crisis took place over Hallowe'en. Although '13 Days' prides itself on its historical verisimilitude, its willingness to capture the repetitive tedium of high-level diplomacy at the expense of more glamorous angles such as Marilyn or the Mafia; its insistence on 'documentary' paraphernalia - precise dates, detailed intertitles giving names and full ranks; despite, in other words, its factual materialism, there is another, concealed world underpinning that of linear history; an older, immutable world of superstition, omens, ghosts. After all, the day after Hallowe'en is All Souls.
There is a brief, telling shot in '13 Days', when in montage we catch a glimpse in Cuba of a female soldier helping out in military operations. In the free US, the women organise parties, answer the phone, or deliver documents. I'm not trying to make a tiresomely pedantic p.c. point: this is the milieu of the film, a macho milieu where men in suits hold the world in their hands, while their wives wait expectantly by.
In recent years 'men' (white, Ivy-League men) have felt beleaguered and emasculated by, among other things, the rise of women in the workplace. Although '13' is about the most frightening fortnight in history, when the whole world seemed on the brink of extinction, it is an oddly comforting, nostalgic film. it shows a world where Ivy Leaguers call the shots, where privilege, education and the old boys' network are a good thing. It is a macho fantasy, not in the Arnie/Sly sense, but in the more plausible, general, pseudo-liberal one, where prevarication, talk, ideals and thoughtful male common sense can win out over earth-threatening crises.

Although the film reveals how perilous American democracy is, not from external threats, but from within, with military coups seemingly only a hysterical tantrum away from success, it shows that Ivy League 'reason' can prevent even this.
The film wants to turn back history - by setting the film in the present tense, it can ignore context. An audience can infer Camelot corruption from allusions to Jackie, Vietnam, etc. but only if you bring historical knowledge with you. Like RFK, it can deny everything. Despite all the revelations about Camelot in the last four decades, '13' is pure hagiography. Kennedy's weakness is praised as sanity.

The film tries its best to excise ideology - there are no harangues about the Free West or the dangers of collectivism (the phlegmatic anti-Reds are obviously military and mad); this is pure professionalism, the political equivalent of a heist movie. Of course, this anti-ideology is itself an ideology - by showing the film from an American point of view, it normalises the American system, even while pointing out its flaws.

In any case, it finally betrays its thriller conventions; unlike the similarly macho 'The Insider', it has to inject its emphasis on dogged process with artificial all-American uplift - the Adlai Stevenson Show at the UN; the religious sentiment that washes over the final quarter. '13' ultimately reneges as a thriller: you can't keep extending deadlines and expect an audience to feel dread, no matter how willing they are to suspend disbelief.
What saves '13' from bing another reactionary tract is its final image, the film's three heroes like gods in the sun, Kenny holding the football that connects him to a glorious past, his future, and his son, his country. It's also a sign of failure. He was once a sporting hero, now he's two rich kids' lackey. This ambiguous image focuses not on the men, the real men who had to negotiate the previous fortnight's anxieties, but their shadows, making them insubstantial, ghostly, reflections of an unseen reality. This points to Kennedy's assassination less than a year later, and the end of this ironically 'innocent' period of American politics, pre-Vietman, pre-Nixon. But it also asks how much substance did the previous 145 minutes have, how much was its way of looking at history and America as dead as the men walking off. Of the two films made in the immediate wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis ('Dr Strangelove', 'Fail Safe'), '13' takes its stylistic cue from the flop. But then, I'm very superstitious.