The Tillman Story (***1/4)

These fact are known about Pat Tillman: One, that the NFL safety turned US Army private died on April 22, 2004, in Afghanistan, in what was at first widely reported as a heroic act, in the face of enemy fire, for which Tillman was given a Silver Star. Second, that, as revealed to the public about a month later, Tillman had in fact died in a friendly fire incident, shot by troops from his own platoon. The discrepancy between what was reported and what occurred, and the efforts of Tillman’s family to find out why, is the subject of Amir Bar-Lev’s (My Kid Could Paint That) documentary, which follows by about a year Jon Krakauer’s book on the same subject.

Charles Spurgeon’s adage, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” seems particularly apt here, when the boots in question are army boots. Coincidentally, Tillman had been involved, peripherally, in an similar episode in Iraq, where he had served his first tour of duty. There, he was part of the unit sent to rescue the captured Jessica Lynch, a mission that was, as he wrote in his journal, a “ big Public Relations stunt.” Lynch herself would confirm that she had not, in fact, shot at the enemy, nor was she in the kind of danger that the public would be told.

Tillman’s reaction to this underscores his independence of thought and the contradictions of a man who both opposed the Iraq War and felt compelled to fight it, who became a bigger celebrity by volunteering for the military, and a bigger one still by dying, yet refused interviews and shunned that role. It is the character of Pat Tillman and his family—his two brothers, one of whom fought with him, his parents, and even his wife, the only girl he ever dated—that elevates this documentary. All of them are interviewed on camera, and the story of the movie is largely of the indefatigable efforts of his mother, especially, and his father to learn what happened.

Bar-Lev focuses narrowly. He does not place this in the larger context of the Bush administration’s efforts to boost support for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, or of military propaganda of the past. Krakauer gets more political, crediting the Tillman story with a temporary boost in public support for the war going into the 2004 election season. He is also more noticeably critical of the role of General Stanley McChrystal, later to become the commander of all forces in Afghanistan. It was McChrystal whose name was on the paperwork for Tillman’s unearned Silver Star, as the film shows. The implication of both the book and the film is that McChrystal would not have blatantly violated the rules without the knowledge and approval of higher-ups such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Besides the military, the media come in for some criticism. The inclusion of footage of Ann Coulter acting incredulous at being told of Tillman’s antiwar sentiments is almost too obvious. But possibly the public deserves a good deal of criticism too, for it is our need for heroes and apparent willingness to be persuaded by celebrities that encourages such myth-making.

The film’s biggest flaw is an unavoidable one. Because it cannot answer the central question it asks—who, ultimately, was responsible for covering up what happened, and why—the film is ultimately frustrating. But it is valuable.

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viewed 9/1/10 at Rave UPenn and reviewed 9/2–5/10

Ghost Writer (***)

Roman Polanski’s thriller is like a video version of a middle-brow novel of the sort that consumes that portion of the bestseller list not consumed with diet books, polemics, and memoirs. Maybe like one written by Robert Harris, whose novel he helped Polanski adapt. I’m not meaning to insult the movie, just saying it’s lighter fare than Oliver Twist or The Pianist, the director’s last two films. But it’s easy to like, so long as you’re not Tony Blair. Blair is not the name of the character played by Pierce Brosnan. He’s supposed to be some other recent ex-prime minister who’s accused of shipping off terrorist suspects for some CIA-approved torture. Come to think of it, foreign-policy conservatives may not love the movie either, since the idea that it’s okay to do that is never entertained. The only questions are what the prime minister did, and how soon Ewan McGregor is going to dig around and figure it out.

McGregor is the title character, who gets hired to finish the prime minister’s memoirs when the original writer dies in an accident. Sorry, an “accident.” Although Polanski, unable to work in America or the UK, could have set the movie in Europe, he fairly successfully re-creates the atmosphere of London and Martha’s Vineyard, where the prime minister shares a compound with his intelligent and mysterious wife (Olivia Williams) and his assistant (Kim Cattrall). Most of the movie take place in the US.

The plot skirts skirts the edge of the plausible, and probably goes over it, but doesn’t insult your intelligence. At the very least, it’s a thriller whose thrills don’t depend on car chases and explosions, and one that delivers a surprise or two.

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viewed 3/24/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 4/6/10

Edge of Darkness (**3/4)

Movies about murdered and imperiled children are often stories about grief when the main character’s a mother (e.g. Changeling, The Deep End of the Ocean, Dead Girl), but are usually about revenge when it’s a man. Liam Neeson in Taken and Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, for example, follow a line that goes back at least to Charles Bronson’s vigilante in Death Wish and through another Gibson thriller, Ransom. Unlike in that movie, the kid can’t be rescued, because she’s been shot by someone apparently targeting Thomas Craven, Gibson’s police detective character. I should say that the “kid” is Craven’s adult daughter. Murdering actual children seems to be one of the few things that are still off limits in mainstream thrillers. Adapted from an acclaimed 25-year-old British miniseries (by the same director, Martin Campbell), this isn’t a slick action film like Taken, or even Live Free or Die Hard, but neither does it weave the murder into a broad narrative, as in, say, Mystic River. Instead, it’s a midtempo potboiler in which a stoic Craven solves the crime as a means to work through his grief, which slowly curdles into rage, with payback his goal. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Payback.)

While nothing seems to be obviously out-of-place or missing from having distilled the five-hour-plus BBC film into a mere 117 minutes, there are hints of condensed storylines. The scheme Craven discovers, involving a corrupt senator and a government contractor, might have been meant as some kind of comment about rapacious corporations, environmentalism, or the role of money in politics, but pretty much gets reduced to a generic paranoid fantasy. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Conspiracy Theory.) One suspects that the mysterious “fixer” played here by Ray Winstone probably made a little more sense in the original production. And when another character implies that Craven hadn’t stayed that close to his daughter before she was killed, that’s another thread that gets dropped. Instead, we see repeated home-movie flashbacks of Craven and the pre-teen version of his daughter. Who knows what happened to the family camcorder in her teen years, or to the girl’s mother, for that matter.

Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale) films his remake with the somber tone of one trying to make a serious movie, but merely winds up with a modestly diverting, occasionally unpredictable mystery.

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viewed 1/30/2010 at Riverview and reviewed 2/1–4/10

Shooter (**3/4)

? A US special-forces marksman (Mark Wahlberg), hired to thwart a presidential assassination, winds up a target of the would-be killers. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directed Jonathan Lemkin’s adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel.
+ I was into this movie for the first half, although I figured out who the villains were. (No big deal, as that gets revealed early.) Here we see the hero display all the tricks of his trade. Like so many criminals, he figures out that Philly is a good place to kill someone and get away with it, so the pivotal scenes take place around Independence Hall, and there’s some impressive aerial footage of the city. With the help of one of the feds and a schoolteacher, he takes on platoons of unfriendly types with just some household items. The main appeal, besides huge explosions, is watching the lone wolf use his superior training to outwit and outfight everyone.
- An exciting setup, but both the premise and the outcome become implausible, then absurd, as the movie goes on. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that I was expecting one of them to shout “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” One actually does say, “I win; you lose.” Twice. But by then the movie has descended into trite formula.
= **3/4 Worth a look for shoot-’em-up fans and conspiracy-movie buffs. Sort of similar to The Sentinel, which is a better movie.

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reviewed 3/29/07

13 Tzameti (***1/2)

? A broke handyman overhears mysterious conversations by his employer that seem to involve a money-making scheme. He heads for a secret assignation in the employer’s stead, not knowing what awaits. The story moves from a hazy beginning to an all-too-clear conclusion. The French-Georgian film won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

+ The black-and-white movie makes a virtue of deliberate minimalism. Some creepy music and sound effects set the mood. The structure is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery,” which seems to describe an ordinary ritual and only becomes horrifying as the reader realizes the pointless cruelty being described. The main character is basically an audience stand-in. He’s an ordinary guy who faces extreme danger the way most people do. They try to escape. You learn just enough about him and the other characters as is necessary to understand the story. There is relatively little dialogue.

- Alfred Hitchcock would seem one obvious inspiration for first-time writer-director Géla Babluani, but the movie lacks much of a psychological dimension. Then again, the film is trying to make you feel like you’re in the situation rather than think about the characters, and it does that expertly.

= ***1/2 I’m being deliberately vague about the plot, since knowing as little as possible is helpful. For people who don’t mind a story that’s somewhat disturbing, but not graphic, this is well worth an hour and a half.

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The Da Vinci Code (**1/2)

 Too much exposition and not enough character interplay make this adaptation of the Dan Brown mega-seller something of a disappointment, and the Catholic Church shouldn’t worry that many people will buy its far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Apparently there was a best-selling novel on which this movie is based, but I didn’t read it. For those similarly uninformed, it’s the tale of a Harvard scholar (Tom Hanks), and expert on symbols, who teams up with a Parisian police investigator (Audrey Tautou) to solve a murder linked, somehow, with the Catholic Church. So brainy is the scholar that he can see a mysterious writing left by the dead man and immediately discern that it must be an anagram, and can even more quickly solve it. But it’s just the first in a series of riddles that lead back to a mystery behind events of the church’s earliest days. There’s a ton of plot here, and, to her credit, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman manages to make most of it comprehensible in two and a half hours. I couldn’t have recounted the sequence of events after seeing the movie, but I more or less followed the action while it was going on. There’s a brief car chase, and some gunplay, but most of this “action” is Hanks or Tautou explaining the significance of this mysterious object or that historical detail. Some of this detail is real, but the conspiracy theory at the heart of the story seems ludicrously far-fetched, which made the story less compelling. Moreover, Hanks and Tautou are a couple of the most likeable actors anywhere, but their characters are both fairly flat here. This is the third collaboration of Goldsman with director Ron Howard, but whereas A Beautiful Mind and the underrated Cinderella Man were very character-driven movies, that aspect is surprisingly absent. Only Ian McKellen, as a scholarly acquaintance of Hanks’s Professor Langdon, adds a bit of levity to all the turgid exposition. (Paul Bettany, as an ultra-creepy, ultra-pious murderer for God, is also very effective.)

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posted 8/19/13