'Body of War': Probing A Nation's Wounds

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 had been 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 in only 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's got 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 all 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 Byrd, to a litany of Congress members parroting GOP talking points (Hillary Clinton, too) and all of it punctuated by the voice-call vote in favor of war authorization -- or, as Byrd puts it, abdication.

It's a ferocious film, not the least because of Young, who is as open as someone in his position could possibly be. He is given his dignity by the filmmakers, but he's not interested. His attitude is: This is how I pee, put on my shoes, don't make love to my wife and get hacked off because my lifeless legs are caught on the car door. He allows Spiro and Donahue to film it all, they oblige, and the result is an alarmingly frank look at someone who, in the wake of this war, isn't so rare a case.

Some reservations: Young's brutal honesty is countered by the filmmakers' apparent desire to evoke some kind of '60s combo of a campfire and a Weavers concert. The original songs provided (very generously, we're sure) by Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder are oppressively faux-folkie; the incidental music of Jeff Layton even includes a few bars of "Kumbaya." Joan Baez is spotted in the crowd at an antiwar rally! Drawing parallels between Vietnam and Iraq -- okay, we get it. But the aesthetic is dated, and it has nothing to do with Young.

Where "Body of War" goes right is in its passion and power and the way its various arteries eventually converge in a meeting at Byrd's office between the senator and Young. "The immortal 23" is how the elderly senator describes his colleagues who voted against the war. Byrd reads all the names, and they're listed, too, in the film's end credits, along with their compatriots in the House. Moviegoers should be so advised, in case they want to bring a pen and paper.

Body of War (87 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated and contains disturbing images, adult content, very brief nudity and a catheter.