www.OscarWatch.com

While much of the attention paid to John F. Kennedy focuses on the scandals of his affairs or the circumstances of his assassination, the Kennedy found by Bruce Greenwood for "Thirteen Days" is of a far more serious mindset.

"I thought of how a situation like this would weigh on a man. Not a great man -- a man," Greenwood says of the film, a dramatization of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which nearly escalated to nuclear war. "It would be ludicrous to imagine that he cruised through this with the offhand aplomb of the prince of Camelot," says Greenwood.

To prepare to play JFK, Greenwood immersed himself in books, video and audio recordings of the president. His portrayal was of a quieter and more intelligent JFK than has been seen in other screen incarnations.

"I was also struck by what a voracious intellect he had and his ability to draw upon the musings of obscure poets to obtain a frame of reference for a political situation," he adds. "The more I read, the more I found how serious he was."

Greenwood and Stephen Culp, who plays the president's brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, worked together on making their characters' close relationship convincing.

"We had a tendency to drift into one another's cadences and pitch, so we spent time to find ways to separate ourselves vocally," Greenwood says. "We were harassing each other from the moment we met ... picking on each other, like brothers do."

Eventually, they had to move on. Culp to other projects and Greenwood to an A&E remake of "The Magnificent Ambersons," which was shot in Ireland. But still, he couldn't shake the ghosts of "Thirteen Days."

"I found myself cruising around there and finding gravestones of Kennedys," he says. "It's hard to shake that association."

Ebert and Roeper both loved "Thirteen Days," though Roeper singled out star Kevin Costner as being perhaps too distracting with his bright light. Costner is getting his career back on track after a few moderate failures on the big screen and a very public divorce. "Thirteen Days" is the first film he's been involved in that hasn't been immediately panned by the critics. However, Roeper, and a few others, have said Costner's Bostonian accent (actors should *never* do these) is bad and distracting.

In a prior collaboration, director Roger Donaldson and Kevin Costner produced the underrated suspense thriller, "No Way Out," which is as taut as they come - brilliantly played, directed, written, and executed. Perhaps the two working together again will recreate that magic. Bruce Greenwood is probably the best actor no one has ever heard of and did probably one of his best performances in Atom Egoyan's "Exotica," then turned around and did a totally opposite character in Egoyan's follow-up, "The Sweet Hereafter." Greenwood, though, seems to be missing something in the publicity department. Perhaps "Thirteen Days" will put him on the map.

Salon.com's Michael Sragow sez:

Despite Costner's bizarrely broad Boston accent, which he tires of and loses midway through, he relaxes into the role of second banana. He doesn't give the performance of the movie -- that would be Greenwood's elegantly underplayed JFK -- but he does intensify the material with his alternating pushiness and mulishness and his old-fashioned masculinity. O'Donnell, a fierce political loyalist, is so secure in his allegiance that he's unafraid of going toe-to-toe with Jackie, or with Jack. Audiences respond to the film's pedestrian, sturdy portrait of co-workers sounding off and fooling around and regrouping for a common cause -- just as they do when watching the infinitely more skillful and entertaining (and even more enlightening) "The West Wing."

And again, this about Greenwood:

"The Missiles of October" also assumed that the audience could keep track of a dozen or so divergent voices. Baker's McNamara has a dynamic moment when he browbeats the Navy's chief of operations, but "Thirteen Days" is pretty much a three-man show. At the apex of this triangle is Greenwood's JFK, who's not afraid to appear diffident or irresolute in the eyes of the cocksure and the trigger-happy. Greenwood knows that just one wince when Jack lowers himself into a chair will announce his back pain more loudly than any bleat or bellow, and that the occasional ruminative glance will make his sparks of anger come off as incendiary.

Closing his review this way:

If only the filmmakers had had the same instincts. Synthesizing more revisionist material would have enlarged, not undercut, this movie's presentation of President Kennedy. Making the audience (and Kennedy himself) more aware of his previous failings with Khrushchev, or acknowledging his administration's ongoing vendetta with Castro, would have made Kennedy's resistance to airstrikes or to another invasion of Cuba the position of a man who has evolved as a statesman. Greenwood is great at looking thoughtful, but even amid the Cuban missile crisis, the movie doesn't give him (or us) enough to back up that look. "Thirteen Days," like a cable news channel, wins an undeservedly high interest level because of what it covers, not how well it covers it. Read the full review.

Meanwhile, some "Thirteen Days" buzz is beginning to take hold. Even Costner's accent didn't ruin it, not according to EW's Owen Gleiberman:

At 2 hours and 15 minutes, ''Thirteen Days'' offers an unrelieved dose of early '60s white men standing around in rooms, talking. There are a few vivid, zooming action moments, as U.S. surveillance jets rocket over hostile Cuban skies, and some of the film's flaws are easy enough to flick away -- like Costner's own overcooked accent, which doesn't stop him from giving a solid performance as JFK's Harvard Irish assistant/ confidant. Yet there's a nagging repetitiveness to the one day after another structure (it's not as if we don't know how it all came out). Catch that rave.