★★
I think this is an especially great time for documentaries, so The Pat Tillman Story comes out at a time of strong work in the field. But I didn’t find this one strong or wonderful. It’s competent, but no more.
If you need another reason to hate Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush (which I don’t), this film will give it to you. But The Pat Tillman Story states the obvious in the Tillman case, finally just presenting the very story the military tells—not a riveting conclusion or documentary investigation. In fact, the military can hardly have been upset at the way the movie stays in the boundaries that the military cover-up finally established. With nothing new to say about Tillman’s death or about the decision to use it for war propaganda, the only thing the movie can do is give vent to the anger of the family, which it does at some length. Another way to approach the subject might have been to try to offer us more of Tillman’s personality so we might be offended at the military’s exploitation of him or see more readily the military’s duplicity or irony. But Bar-Lev either chooses not to do that explanation…or else he can’t.
A few minutes of stonewalling by those of high rank at a House hearing give a little whiff of something rotten, with respect to the cover-up of how Tillman died, but the movie lets the witnesses – and congressmen – off with little examination. I wish we’d seen Tillman’s father, an attorney, tell us the questions he’d have asked, but the movie instead meanders off in disappointment.
For all the competence of the film, it doesn’t offer much insight. The sad moral here is that a good cover-up works and might not even inspire sharp, investigative, documentary outrage.
