Drenched in emotion and suffused with good intentions, “Body of War” is impossible not to like, but difficult to admire. Produced and directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue (yes, that Phil Donahue), the movie uses the wrenching story of one American soldier to mount an angry if unfocused jeremiad against the war in Iraq.
In March 2004, Tomas Young, a 24-year-old new Army enlistee from Kansas City, Mo., arrived in Iraq. Almost immediately he was in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (“Home of Warrior Care,” as its Web site puts it), on the unfathomably difficult mend from a bullet that left him paralyzed from the chest down. This, then, is the body of war of the movie’s title, a body ravaged by physical and psychological wounds, a body hunched and writhing in pain. Over the course of the movie, you become extraordinarily acquainted with this body, which Mr. Young offers up to the camera to us with remarkable intimacy and trust, largely as a cautionary example, though also because this body is itself damning evidence against the war.
Much of “Body of War” takes familiar form. Serving as the cinematographer, Ms. Spiro, who has a long-term history in nonfiction film, carefully and unobtrusively follows Mr. Young through his day-to-day life in observational fashion. You watch Mr. Young struggle to put on his clothes, labor to sit up straight in his wheelchair and fight with the very people who are trying to help him, including his endlessly patient mother, Cathy Smith. In time you also see this appealing young man turn into a committed antiwar activist, a trajectory that takes him from murmuring in front of his television to speechmaking alongside mothers whose sons have died in Iraq, including the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.
There is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress. Throughout the movie Mr. Donahue and Ms. Spiro insert visual and sound clips of various lawmakers, from Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Fred Thompson (both “yea”) to Senators Robert C. Byrd and Lincoln Chafee (both “nay”), during their 2002 deliberations to grant President Bush authority to invade Iraq. Using the vote as a countdown to the inevitable, complete with the pounding sound of a gavel, certainly captures your attention. But, much like the blaringly intrusive music sprinkled throughout, the countdown adds nothing substantial or meaningful to a documentary that makes its strongest points when it sticks close to Mr. Young.
BODY OF WAR
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Produced and directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue; director of photography, Ms. Spiro; edited by Bernadine Colish; music by Jeff Layton, Eddie Vedder, Bright Eyes, Michael Franti and the Lafayette Baptist Church Choir of Brooklyn; released by Film Sales Company. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. This film is not rated.