The Brink of War review

Brink of War follows Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986 trying to negotiate major reductions in the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and the Soviet Union. This wasn’t actually their first face-to-face meeting. They’d met in Geneva the year before, and Reykjavik was the follow-up where they got remarkably close to some extremely ambitious reductions before the negotiations broke down.

This was obviously a huge moment in history, the two of them sitting down and basically feeling one another out. The background is that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was under enormous financial pressure. Trying to keep up with American defense spending was killing them, their economy was struggling, and Gorbachev had very good reasons for wanting to reduce the burden of the arms race and move those resources somewhere else. The Americans did not fully understand how much pressure the Soviet system was under. So neither side entirely knows where the other side is coming from. They don’t know how serious the other side is, they don’t know whether somebody is trying to trick them, and nobody wants to be embarrassed publicly or walk out of the room looking like a fool Most of the movie is Reagan and Gorbachev talking through all of that. It’s told more from Reagan’s point of view, although you do get some sense of what Gorbachev is trying to accomplish. The wives become your B plot. Nancy Reagan stays home while Raisa Gorbacheva travels to Iceland with her husband and gets a lot of attention. Nancy had originally wanted to go, but she and Ronald decided it might be a distraction, and then Raisa shows up and makes a spectacle of herself, at least from Nancy’s perspective, and now Nancy is sitting at home watching all of it happen. It turns into this strange little competition between the wives. Then you’ve got the C plot with the CIA and KGB people in the basement basically sharing office space while their bosses negotiate upstairs, which I thought was amusing.

Overall this is well done. My problem is that I already knew most of the underlying history, so it played dry for me. If this material is new to you, I think you get considerably more out of it, because you don’t know where the negotiations are going or what everybody is trying to accomplish. I already knew the basic facts, I knew where the sticking points were, and I knew they weren’t going to walk out of Iceland having abolished nuclear weapons. There wasn’t much here that surprised me.

The other thing hanging over the movie for me is where we are now. A lot of the nuclear arms-control framework that developed during and after this period has been walked back. The United States and Russia are not in a particularly cooperative place right now, arms control has broken down in a lot of ways, and we’re back to talking about expanding nuclear capabilities. So you’re watching Reagan and Gorbachev sitting there 40 years ago seriously discussing whether they might dramatically reduce or even eliminate whole categories of nuclear weapons, while knowing that we’re moving in the opposite direction again. That makes the whole thing feel less like a victory. Maybe it makes it more important historically. It just doesn’t feel triumphant.

This is a good movie. The characterizations are good and the actors are good. If you’re interested in historical drama or political negotiation you’ll probably like it. I just found it a little boring because I already knew where all the roads led.