Brinksmanship
FILM: Deterrence
DIRECTOR: Rod Lurie
STARRING: Kevin Pollak, Timothy Hutton
GRADE: B
Writer/director Rod Lurie's Deterrence plays more like an issue-oriented
television movie-of-the-week than like a conventional feature. The action is
restricted to one set, the characters talk and fret, and we're supposed to ask
ourselves what we'd do in the same situation. That description might sound like
an implied criticism, and the film's low budget certainly will diminish its
potential audience. But in a summer of such dreadful alternatives, this film
has the striking virtue of at least daring to be about something.
Like Gerald Ford in 1976, Walter Emerson (Kevin Pollak) is an
incumbent president running for re-election to an office he was never elected
to in the first place. He was an appointed vice-president and was moved to the
White House when his popular predecessor died. While campaigning in Colorado,
and in the midst of a snow storm that has marooned him and his staff in an
isolated roadside diner, President Emerson learns that the son of Saddam
Hussein, now the leader of Iraq, has launched still another attack on Kuwait.
Moreover, Hussein Jr. has threatened to launch biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons at a series of targets in America, Europe and Israel if the United
States tries to intervene this time as it did in the Gulf War.
Emerson's options are restricted in a way that President Bush's
weren't in 1991. Emerson lacks the conventional ground army, the uncomplicated
alliances and the time available to his predecessor. He's also in the midst of
an election campaign, where he feels it important to prove himself tough enough
to be worthy of his office. So he decides to play the brinksman card. He
informs the Iraqis that he will drop a hydrogen bomb on Baghdad in one hour and
20 minutes if they don't withdraw their troops and rescind their threats
against other nations. And so begins the game of nuclear chicken. Will somebody
please blink before millions of civilians die?
Not all of this works. Melodramatic business in the diner with an
agitated cook proves an unwise intrusion into a fundamentally cerebral story.
And a bit of trickery at the end seems a case of gilding the lily. At its best,
though, the film is effectively provocative. Conversations between Emerson and
his two top advisors (Timothy Hutton and Sheryl Lee Ralph) work well to
underscore the president's excruciating dilemma: how do you deal with a madman?
John Kennedy became a national hero by risking nuclear war during the Cuban
missile crisis. But historians will long debate the rightness of his stance,
and humanity will always be glad that Khrushchev blinked. Kennedy himself
subsequently wondered what might have happened had the Russian leader waited
for the young American president to yell chicken first.
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