SUN SCORE

***1/2

The title is misleading. Trials contain prosecutions and defenses. This documentary presents the most aggressive case imaginable against Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser and secretary of state who gave America a new image of the "action intellectual" while his attackers say he was committing war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Chile. It treats some of his defenders (including Alexander Haig and Brent Scowcroft) as hostile witnesses. Yet the movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

How did a portly Harvard intellectual with a thick German accent become an improbable sex symbol, squiring around the likes of Jill St. John? He took advantage of the post-Camelot Zeitgeist during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the press had routinely begun to glamorize politicians Hollywood-style. Kissinger flirted with reporters shrewdly and outrageously. He humorously intimated that he was a "secret swinger" and proclaimed that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" - an open secret that would be exploited for decades to come in magazines like Vanity Fair and even, at times, the New Yorker.

The documentary's makers, Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki, display filmmaking instinct as well as intelligence. Without underlining the point, they link Kissinger's juggling of a party-animal media image and dead-serious political purpose with his other amazing balancing act - professing idealistic goals of statesmanship, like achieving Nixon's goal of "peace with honor" in Vietnam, while practicing political brinksmanship behind the scenes, to further American prestige and his own personal clout.

This movie achieves a meaning more visceral and universal than its source book, Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger. A fierce, nimble muckraker, Hitchens crafts a compelling brief. But the Kissinger of this film is more resonant and magnetic: a navigator nonpareil in the mysterious meeting places of our politics and culture. Whether as an audience or an electorate, we accept the spurious imagery of these shadow lands at our peril.

Of course, the movie's explicit content is more galvanizing than any Bond film. Taking off from Hitchens' polemic (and with Hitchens' on-camera prodding), the moviemakers briskly fill in the machinations that led to the derailment of the Paris peace talks in 1968 and the bombing of Cambodia, as well as the disastrous post-Vietnam strategies adopted to prove America's continuing resolve to contain communism. According to this movie, Kissinger's brutal Realpolitik helped lead the U.S. government to support genocide in East Timor and the overthrow of a democratically elected socialist government in Chile through kidnapping and assassination as well as the usual gory coup d'etat.

As a piece of reporting, The Trials of Henry Kissinger relies on witnesses and documents, not some new Deep Throat; it could be used as a primer on how to craft persuasive advocacy journalism. Some of its telling insights come from its least ideological sources, like Walter Isaacson, a Kissinger biographer (and now head of CNN), who articulates how the man pioneered the intersection of political manipulation and celebrity. Isaacson is also perceptive on Kissinger as a boy whose existence in 1930s Germany fueled both his ego (because he was the smartest kid in his class) and his insecurity (because he was also beaten for being a Jew). Kissinger's family fled to America in 1938, when he was 15. Isaacson feels that Kissinger's Holocaust experience permeated his world view and drew him to analyze, court and direct state power.

The movie couches its indictment artfully; British journalist William Shawcross takes pains to say that America created the conditions that spawned the Khmer Rouge regime and its killing fields, not the Khmer Rouge itself. But to attain greatness the moviemakers would have had to examine their first principles - and those of their antagonists - more incisively. For example, they could have done more than take on faith the feasibility of a universal justice system, which underlies their talk of "crimes against humanity." They could have examined in depth the positions of Cold Warriors who felt they were engaged in a conflict for mankind's political soul.

Kissinger, seen only in archival interviews and clips, states his best defense when he says that political morality differs from personal morality because in politics you must often choose between one evil and another.

But The Trials of Henry Kissinger does a better job than even its makers might know. It keeps catalyzing questions and opening minds as they try to close their case.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger

What A documentary by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki

Released by First Run Features

Rating Unrated

Time 80 minutes