Release Date: varies by city
Directors: Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue
Cinematographer: Ellen Spiro
Studio/Run Time: The Film Sales Company, 87 mins.
It’s a sad truth that American audiences are hardly flocking to watch movies about Iraq. Body of War is not the film that will reverse that trend. It tells a characteristically (for war docs) grim, but absolutely essential story, of Tomas Young, a 25-year-old Kansas City resident who enlisted in the Army in the heady, patriotic fervor following Sept. 11. Young returned after less than a week in Iraq paralyzed from the chest down when a bullet hit his spine. As its title suggests, Body of War centers on the often unacknowledged minutia of Young’s sacrifice beyond lifelong confinement to a wheelchair: the catheters, a barrage of pills, dizzy spells, sexual dysfunction and depression. It is just one more in a long list of indignities when antiwar activist Bobby Muller, himself paralyzed in the Vietnam War, schools Young in just how inadequate his post-injury care was. “You got ripped off,” he says.
Remarkably, despite all this physical and psychological pain, Young is a sardonic, appealing, likable screen presence who seems to have turned the absurdity of his situation into a source of dark comedy. An outspoken critic of the war, Young’s disgust with the Bush administration’s rush to war and his efforts to speak out keep Body of War from succumbing to self-pity. Performing tracks from another tale of damaged youth, Into the Wild, Eddie Vedder also contributes two original songs and offers a soulful interior voice for Young’s heartsickness. Much of Body of War has a musical rhythm of its own, as the film ping-pongs between Young’s marital and health troubles and the precedent for all that ails him: the October 2002 Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Forces against Iraq. Throughout the film, co-directors Ellen Spiro and talk-show titan Phil Donahue return to that congressional chorus: the speeches in support of the war and the less frequent objections, many voiced by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who eventually meets with Young in the film.
In the end, the Congressmen blindly mouthing the President’s words come off as the epitome of shortsightedness. And Young, despite his age, seems to have the armor of hard-won wisdom and a clear-eyed view on his side.