Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, discusses his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Errol Morris's follow-up to The Fog of War places Donald Rumsfeld in the hot seat, probing his memos ('snowflakes') and evasive reasoning. The film is compelling as a study in self-justification and political obfuscation, though Rumsfeld proves a more elusive and frustrating subject than McNamara, which both intrigues and limits the film's revelatory power. Morris's signature interrotron technique and Danny Elfman's score lend atmospheric weight, but the cinematography is fairly static by design. The ending — Rumsfeld's smiling non-answer about why he agreed to be interviewed — is memorably unsettling and thematically resonant.