“Why is this man smiling?” asks the cunning poster for “The Unknown Known,” documentarian Errol Morris’s new film about former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a pertinent question, and one that, as you watch the film, becomes more and more absurd. Why is this man smiling, really? And how do we wipe that smile off his face?
Another pertinent question might be: Why did Rumsfeld agree to be part of this?
While the film charts Rumsfeld’s career through multiple administrations and two terms as Secretary of Defense (1975-1977 under Gerald Ford; 2001-2006 under George W. Bush), Morris is less interested in humanizing his subject — which is the case in the flawed Netflix documentary “Mitt” — as probing that smile. When pitted up against the Interrotron— Morris’s device for conducting interviews, which forces the subject to look directly in the camera lens, giving the effect they are addressing the audience —will that smile crack? Will we understand its omnipresence?
Or maybe we won’t understand it at all because there is nothing behind that smile.
But the smile is what interests Morris, or at least what it says. It’s used in the film as a framing device, and Morris lets the camera linger on Rumsfeld’s face in close up for an uncomfortable amount of time. We become acquainted with that smile. It shows up in the interviews and historical photographs and footage. You can feel it in audio recordings. It becomes a recurring joke, maybe even a dark one.
For the most part, Morris lets his subject laugh while being laughed at. There is no hard condemnation of Rumsfeld or his colleagues for the crimes of the Bush years, but a critique remains. This is most evident in Morris’s unraveling of Rumsfeld’s bizarre and twisting logic, which includes publicly stated phrases such as “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” or the “unknown unknowns” that give the film its title — the statements seem more like deflections than answers to questions. Everything with Rumsfeld is an evasion, the ultimate spin and a way to avoid direct blame. When he becomes prickly, challenging Morris on the semantic meaning of a word or phrase, the filmmaker will contradict what’s being said with quick bursts of text that display the actual definition of the word or phrase in question.
“The Unknown Known” won’t receive the accolades of “The Fog of War,” Morris’s documentary about former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and is most easily comparable to his portrait of Rumsfeld. The two are companion pieces certainly, but a carbon copy wouldn’t have been interesting. What makes the “The Unknown Known” worth watching is the ways in which it is not like its predecessor; where McNamara dry and direct, Rumsfeld is slippery and hard to pin down. The film is the ultimate known unknown disguised as a known known, to use Rumsfeldian terminology. Or to untangle the logic a bit, it’s a film about a subject we think we know but really don’t, and maybe never will.
