The Tillman Story

September 2nd, 2010 · No Comments · Film Reviews

This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Pat Tillman, an all-star defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army special forces with his younger brother just months after 9/11. Two years later, the celebrity soldier was dead, killed in a Taliban ambush. At the memorial service celebrating his life, military members extolled his heroism and recounted stories of how his actions saved the lives of his entire squad.

It was a great story. Too bad none of it was true.

The truth is that Tillman was killed not by the enemy, but by his own men in a machismo display of trigger-happy bloodlust. The military, jolted by the loss of one of its most effective PR tools, decided to turn tragedy into triumph. Instead of telling the truth of Tillman’s fate, the Army invented a heroic story, destroyed the physical evidence, issued a posthumous Silver Star and threw a lavish military funeral, something Tillman had expressly forbidden in his will. But the military deceived the wrong family. While their cover-up may have fooled the American people and turned Tillman’s death into a powerful political propaganda tool to bolster domestic support for an unpopular war (a tactic used just a year or so earlier with the “rescue” of Pvt. Jessica Lynch), the Tillmans got to the truth, despite the Army’s attempt to drown them in more than 3,000 pages of technical paperwork. The paper trail, including a leaked top-secret memo, eventually showed that the conspiracy went all the way to the White House.

Director Amir Bar-Lev’s blistering new documentary may sound like the most uncreative title ever conceived, but it hides a multivalent treasure trove of meanings—first, the detailed account of “the most famous enlisted man in the Army;” second, a family’s crusade to uncover the truth; and lastly, the creation of a mythology. This mythology is the most fascinating aspect of the film, as it is double-sided—the patriotic champion and showpiece of a right wing, pro-military fable and Pat Tillman, the man.

Tillman was one of those rare human beings with a square jaw, tree-trunk neck and locomotive-sized chest who actually resembles the impossibly chiseled physicality of comic book superheroes. Those who assume he was just a meathead jock are denying themselves the far more complicated and interesting truth, as are those who want him to remain little more than a gung-ho soldier in the model of John Wayne. The truth was that Tillman was an endlessly curious eccentric who lived on the edge, a free-spirited iconoclast raised in a family of equally direct, candid, profane personalities (the more you understand the Tillman family, especially Tillman’s mother and one-woman crusader, Mary, the more you understand their wrath at having their son co-opted for the purposes of flag-waving propaganda). Tillman was an exceptional student and athlete, a romantic who married his elementary school sweetheart, an avowed atheist who studied religion with an academic passion, read both Noam Chomsky and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a private person who enlisted in the army, as best we can tell (he never made his reasons for quitting football and joining the military public) out of a genuine belief in the power of sacrifice and patriotic duty. He felt Afghanistan was a necessary front on the war on terror but returned from a tour of duty in Iraq convinced America’s reasons for being there were both criminal and immoral.

Yet just when you think to yourself, “Tillman was a truly special man,” you remember the film resists just those sorts of assumptions. “He’s not what these people wish he was,” says his youngest brother. While we can assume we are far closer to the truth of the real Tillman given the access and participation of his family and widow, what, in the end, do even they know? While it may be tempting to believe that The Tillman Story merely takes its subject from one ill-suited pedestal and places him on another, such a conclusion is utterly at odds with everything the film is trying to say. Sure, respect the man, but don’t for a minute assume you know him or the reasons for his actions. He is not a hero figure for the left any more than he is for the right. In all likelihood, the surprisingly humble and curiously private Tillman would not have approved even of this documentary.

You will leave The Tillman Story enraged, not because the movie is bad but because it does its job so superbly well—moving you out of both your seat and your apathy. The film tells of a PR dream that turned into a nightmare, of one of the military’s most shameful moments and of the power of unbounded familial love. Funny, sad, profane and deeply disturbing, The Tillman Story is the very embodiment of the rousing sentiment, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”