Chief among the very few heroes of Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue's stirring "Body of War" is Tomas Young, a 25-year-old who was in Iraq for five days when he was hit by an AK-47 round and paralyzed from the chest down. A typically outraged young man (he enlisted Sept. 13, 2001), Young is now a symbol of what the current unpleasantries have cost certain Americans, while leaving others unscathed, oblivious or better off than they were.

But Young has a stepfather. He's only in two scenes, but what you get in that short amount of time is a portrait of a man pugnacious in his conservatism, his hard-shell politics impervious to the fact that he has one son in a wheelchair and another fighting in Iraq. He defends the war; he snorts at the idea that the president should lower himself to talk to an anti-Bush activist like Cindy Sheehan. If he wasn't in this movie; he'd never watch it. He might not anyway. Just as the son represents one disillusioned faction of the country, the father personifies another, a shrinking but intractable part of the American electorate that will never change sides on the war, in part because they so dislike the people who are saying it's wrong.

Naturally, what you want in this otherwise architecturally sound, emotionally ravaging movie is a confrontation between father and son. You don't get it. You can understand why, but the film's failure to acknowledge the obvious -- that fathers and sons (especially those named Bush) are what a lot of this war is about -- is the gaping hole in an otherwise beautiful construct.

There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand). Imagine Spiro and Donahue driving their movie down a four-lane highway, smoothly changing lanes -- from Young's adjustment and activism to the blazing prewar antiwar oratory of West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd to a litany of members of Congress parroting GOP talking points (Hillary Clinton, too), and all of it punctuated by the voice-call vote in favor of war authorization.

-- John Anderson (April 4, 2008)

Contains disturbing images, adult content, very brief nudity and a catheter.