Dressing Down the Kennedy Mythos.

Kennedy leftism--the shearings of principles moussed with convenience and wealth --is Hollywood's favorite sort. It's so difficult, after all, to earn millions creating entertainment for the hoi polloi and at the same time muster actionable concern for the social rights of those same poor from the comfort of your private Lear. So, we get Primary Colors, whose flip betrayal of its depiction of campaign skullduggery ends in an earnest, we're-gonna-make-history blather; The Patriot's equation of pacifism with flag-waving slaughter; The Contender's preposterously hyper-left pronouncements mated to the amused glorification of federal double-dealing.

Bill Clinton made it possible for Hollywood to suddenly use "the President" as a robust daddy and reliable action hero once again (from Air Force One to The West Wing). That's fitting, since he has always seemed more Beverly Hills than Capitol Hill. Clinton's studly model was, of course, JFK himself, whose experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis might be the only unambiguously righteous trial any prez has endured since Roosevelt. In fact, almost every chief executive officer since JFK has pined for just such a clear-cut test so as to solidify his own legend.

Roger Donaldson's ennobled melodrama 13 Days shakes in its boots for President Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's smart enough to keep the Camelot trumpet-blowing to a minimum.

After all, what was most far-fetched about Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) wasn't the conspiracy hugger-mugger but the very idea that Kennedy was America's blessed liberal savior taken from us in a time of great need. Kevin Costner's teary climactic harangue to that effect only made the film's raucous speculations seem naive. Here, in 13 Days, is Costner again as Camelot's own Lancelot escorting his soon-to-be martyred Arthur through the face-off against the Mordred of Soviet aggression. Indeed, Costner's refreshingly scabrous rendering of Presidential aide Kenneth O'Donnell makes him more like JFK's bodyguard, running interference and strong-arming the bureaucrats.

Kennedy, as he's played by Bruce Greenwood, is a thoughtful yet somehow fragile figure; he needs buffers, handlers, and intermediaries like a turtle needs a shell.

The film's primary tension lies in the question of whether or not the unseasoned Jack is up to the challenge. The portrait of a young, sweet-looking college boy with a pretty wife facing the Soviets down and nervily avoiding nuclear war gave the crisis an extra terrifying edge then, and endows it with a special poignancy now.

But Kennedy was a politician first, legend second, and 13 Days is clear-eyed about the compromises, connivances, and strategic self-service that are de rigueur in American statesmanship.

Still, Donaldson's movie pities the poor bastard in a way that seems unarguably post-Dealey Plaza. Politics as such rarely enters the movie's dramatic web--beyond the blaming of the Bay of Pigs debacle on John Foster Dulles, and the general silence about the Kennedy Administration's actions in Cuba before the Soviets started shipping in missiles. Both JFK and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy (Steven Culp) are above the fray, while the film focuses fastidiously on the day-to-day mini-dramas, climaxing, more or less, when the aging Adlai Stevenson (Michael Fairman) confronts the Soviet delegation at the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy mythos is being consciously, if gently, dressed down.

"We haven't been that impressive to date," O'Donnell snarls at one point about the Administration's wary reputation among students, "and they have good cause to question our judgment." When the brothers decide to leak a possible negotiation with the Soviets to the press, O'Donnell again acts as their strategic conscience, invoking the memory of Joseph Kennedy Sr.'s international meddlings in the Nazi era: "The idea is that bad!"

Diplomacy is only so suspenseful, and using "actual White House transcripts" to shape the dialogue, as this movie does, isn't such a brilliant idea when the film's ostensible suspense rests with the use of atomic force that is four or five major stages down the road.

Without placing any kind of responsibility upon the Kennedys for an imperialist foreign policy that struggled to control Central America long before and long after but definitely while JFK held office, 13 Days relies on an obvious villain: the military, a battery of mountain-faced Cold Warriors who unanimously call for a preemptive attack. Like George C. Scott's General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, they are ready to accept millions of U.S. casualties for the chance to cry havoc.

Kevin Conway's General Curtis LeMay says, "The big, red dog is digging in our backyard, and we have the right to shoot him!"

Scene after scene features Greenwood's Jack facing down the aged, barrel-chested hawks with steely indecision, and even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Dylan Baker) gets to holler at an itchy-finger admiral during a blockade showdown.

13 Days isn't the first Hollywood film involving this hair-raising Cold War backgammon meet, nor the leftiest. The cheesy Che! (1969) sees the Cuban revolution exclusively through the eyes of the merciless guerrilla martyr, played by Omar Sharif, while Alfred Hitchcock's same-year Topaz appropriated the Crisis template, via Leon Uris, for the purposes of dry-eyed espionage involving French spooks. The most salient and affecting use of the incident might still be as the backdrop to Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), which conjoins imminent nuclear rain, William Castle-type monster movies, and Florida teenagers discovering first love in a fallout shelter.

Donaldson's post-Clintonian version is at once more factual and much duller--a check-the-clock training film for Cold War executives and a portrait of a historical conflict in which neither the Russians nor the Cubans are present in any meaningful form. What it isn't is the standard Hollywood hagiography--although centering an entire movie on Kennedy's uncertain but finally successful deployment of American might has an inherently worshipful thrust.

If the filmmakers want to be absolutely fair to the facts, perhaps they should consider inflicting the same treatment--transcripts and all--upon the Bay of Pigs, an undemocratic cock-up that even Kevin Costner couldn't bandage.

Michael Atkinson is a film critic)Or the Village Voice. His new book is "Ghosts in the Machine: Speculating on the Dark Heart of Pop Cinema" (Limelight Editions, 2000).