I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, and his Lifetime of Service to War The Unknown Known is the latest documentary from Errol Morris. Like his interviews with Robert McNamara in his film Fog of War, he interviews another architect of war, this time the Second Iraq War. Unlike former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who pushed a continuation of the Vietnam conflict when he was in office, Donald Rumsfeld is not apologetic about his role in sending Americans off to die overseas. In his book In Retrospect, McNamara states in Time Magazine, "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."Rumsfeld has no apologies to make, according to the man himself. And he learned no lesson from Vietnam except, as he would say, "it was a failure of imagination" that we lost in Vietnam. Even Nixon apologized about his mistakes when talking to David Frost. I am sure Director Morris was under legal contract not to ask tough, direct questions of Rumsfeld. Thus, he let Rumsfeld indict himself. Rumsfeld is narcissistic and unapologetic about the Second Iraq War. He sees no wrong in making the U.S. strong militarily regardless in how that strength is used. He does not, in The Unknown Known, see that the Second Iraq War was based on lies at all. He sees no lies. He submits that Saddam Hussein and Iraq did have WMDs, we just couldn't find them. He believes the U.N. weapons inspectors were duped and needed to keep looking. He does not agree that water boarding is torture, no matter what Human Rights Watch and others say. He sees know wrong except in our "failure of imagination."Rumsfeld is a master of Newspeak, using phrases like "peace through strength", and "weakness is provocation." This all comes out in the movie, and it was no surprise to most of the audience. He lives in a world of lies, and the person he deludes the most is himself. Rating: Rent it. It is worth a view, and I would love to say that you should see it multiple times. But there are no dramatic revelations in the movie, no sense of awaking. In fact, the lesson is that a beltway insider has many ways to deny the suffering of others, especially those we kill thousands of miles away for no cause. Rumsfeld sees war not as a destination, but a journey. As long as the U.S. stays on that journey, he is happy. Peace, Tex Shelters

Overall, a pretty good treatment of an important subject for a documentary. Errol Morris does, however, return to his favorite directorial conceits over and over again.One such tic of his is the sped up view of a skyline (with the clouds racing across the sky, day turning into twilight, then night all in a few seconds). I suppose some directors use this technique to indicate the passage of time, but in this movie most scenes opened with titles on the screen indicating the month, day, year, etc. Hence, no need for the fast-moving clouds.Also, because Rumsfeld referred to his messages as "snowflakes," Morris over-used the glass ball snowflakes as a bridge between many scenes. Morris is an admirable documentary film maker and shouldn't fall into the habit of pro forma use of such conceits.

The Unknown KnownThere is a myth about the documentary film genre that it is some sort of quest for objective truth; when in fact there is no greater and often times no more effective means of subjective film making . No documentarian worth his salt is going to go forward with a project without a point of view.And so it is with documentarian Errol Morris as he tries to pin down former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld to some objective truths about the war in Iraq. It's slow going.For Morris this is not without precedent. In his "The Fog of War" he was able to get Lyndon Johnson's (and I should also add John Kennedy's) secretary of defense Robert Mac Namara, a chief architect of the Viet Nam war to show contrition, regret and even self pity about the advice he gave and decisions he made during that turbulent time. To those like Morris who believe that the Viet Nam war was a disaster, this must have proved satisfying. They gave him an Academy Award for it . Morris also believes the Iraq war was a disaster but in Rumsfeld he found a much tougher nut to crack.The film documents Rumsfeld's rise to power as a career politician and bureaucrat in which he navigated through many a troubled water to become a trusted confidant and administrator for Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush the second, and given a certain set circumstances might have become President of the United States. But he made some enemies too, Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman, George Bush the first, and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, as well as a very public feud with Condoleezza Rice. And these were his fellow Republicans! Richard Nixon called Rumsfeld "a ruthless little bastard" and I can't imagine a statement like that coming from higher authority. The long and the short of it is that Rumsfeld has faced off against a lot tougher guys than Errol Morris.Morris seems now to suspect that Rumsfeld might have got the best of him, since in his post release interviews he emphasizes how Rumsfeld "horrifies' him. However, that doesn't come off in the film. Rumsfeld appears to be a man of considerable charm and wit, with an easy humor about events and himself. It is well to remember that Rumsfeld fully co-operated with this project, one might even say eagerly co-operated. He wanted his side publicly aired and decided to do it this way, even though he knew Morris's predisposition. To Morris's credit he gives Rumsfeld free reign and ample opportunity to make his case. But Rumsfeld does not control the editing process and it here that Morris strikes back. Using cross cutting, graphics, and archival footage Morris exposes Rumsfeld's renowned candor as a smokescreen for obfuscation and evasion. Most particularly, in Rumsfeld's now famous, or infamous if you prefer, philosophical rumination on what could be known or unknown , or whatever the hell he said, in response to a direct question as to whether he (Rumsfeld) had any evidence that Sadam Hussein had participated or assisted in the 9/11 attacks. This was called by the press at the time (rather admiringly I might add) as "Rummy speak". In the film Rumsfeld admits there wasn't then and isn't now any such evidence.Even more telling to me was his mastery of expressing a limited truth and passing it off as candor. In summing up the Viet Nam War Rumsfeld says this: "Some things work out, some things don't .That one didn't." Hard to argue with that. True, as far as it goes, but it does not illuminate. Hell, I could have come up with that over a couple of Irish Whiskeys at the local tavern, and maybe even thought to be pretty profound by my fellow inebriates at the bar, but I think we have a right to expect more than that from our public officials. Did we learn anything? Would we do anything differently? In listening to Rumsfeld's echo the answer is apparently and depressingly, no. Given the perceived threats at the respective times in Iraq and Viet Nam, our policy makers did exactly the same thing. Author Evan S. Connell in his book "Son of the Morning Star" recounts how General Philip Sheridan as one of the key policy makers leading to the destruction of the Plains Indian tribes after the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn, reflected on his role. Sheridan seemed to empathize with the Indians and implied that had the situations been reversed, he would have acted in the very same way the Indians had. He would have resisted. To which Connell comments: "Like other generals, bureaucrats and private citizens who contribute to some irrevocable disaster, he wondered about it afterward." Not Donald Rumsfeld, no qualms, no regrets, no apologies. He did his duty and history can sort it out. And of course it will.Morris ends the film with a shot of an empty ocean which I took to be metaphor and interpreted thus: It is shimmering and shiny, even magnificent to look at but who knows what horrors lie beneath the surface. Like Donald Rumsfeld, it covers the "Unknown Knowns".

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know." This was the enigmatic quote from American politician Donald Rumsfeld that inspired the title of this interview by acclaimed documentary maker Errol Morris. Rumsfeld had an astonishing career working for no fewer than four US presidents and serving twice as Secretary of State for Defense - once as the youngest holder of the position (1975- 1977) and then later as the oldest holder of the post (2001-2006). In his second term as Defense Secretary, he was a principal architect of the so-called 'war on terror', sending troops into Afghanistan and then Iraq.The fascinating testimony presented by Morris is both written and oral. Rumsfeld was famous for his blizzard of memos - known as "snowflakes" - and Morris managed to gain access to all the unclassified ones and to persuade Rumsfeld to read out the most relevant to the documentary. Additionally Morris posed a series of searching questions in an interview shot over 11 days and recorded using the film maker's trademark "Interrotron" device which means that Rumsfeld is seen staring straight into the camera. It has to be said that Rumsfeld is a fluent writer and an articulate speaker and, after eight decades, is as sharp as ever, so there is no revelatory moment like David Frost's interview with Richard Nixon, but it is precisely his evasiveness and the charming manner in which he accomplishes this that is so revealing of a bizarre and (when given power) frightening character.I saw "The Known Unknown" at its UK premiere in central London's Curzon Soho cinema in the presence of Errol Morris who made some opening remarks and then, after the screening, took a question & answer session. He compared this documentary with "The Fog Of War", his 2003 interview with another US Defense Secretary when he questioned Robert McNamara on the Vietnam war, and called the two films "bookends". He noted that McNamara was "deeply reflective", but characterised Rumsfeld's performance as "deeply unreflective". He called Rumsfeld "a skillful obscurantist" who was "obsessive with language" and had "a complete lack of irony", highlighting his "infernal grin".The banality of much of Rumsfeld's language - "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" - reminded me of Peter Sellers' penultimate film "Being There" (1979) in which he played a simple gardener whose bland aphorisms about nature led to him being co-opted by America's political power brokers. Morris has done us a service in capturing all this for history in the hope that we can learn from history. What is totally unclear is why Rumsfeld agreed to the interview. This was Morris's last question to him and he responded: "I'll be darned if I know".