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Dir. Phil Donahue & Ellen Spiro

Rating: 6.4  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

There's just about no mistaking the angle of this film, directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil (yes, that Phil) Donahue. It opens with a time-lapse shot of Congress, rising up from pitch black darkness to a busy day, over the leftist warblings of Eddie Vedder, and then cuts back and forth to shots of Iraq War vet Tomas Young, paralyzed from the chest down by an Iraqi sniper, struggling to get his pants over his dead legs. Throughout the film, Donahue and Spiro opt for blatancy over subtlety, which, I suppose is fair enough, given their subject matter. Rather than simply court the already-converted, you get the sense the filmmakers are striving to hit chords with inveterate conservatives, showing in no uncertain terms just how wrong the President was to push for the war and how idiotic Congress was to authorize it. No congressperson gets a free pass here, all those who voted yes are graphically called out, often with short C-SPAN clips of their posturing and theorizing to the rest of their cohorts, forever echoing the same tired clichés ("smoking gun" is used over and over) and quoting from the exact same source materials as their fellow hawks. Perhaps none takes a worse hit than Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, who, in making his case for the war, lovingly refers to Bush's cabinet as the most "glittering display of talent that has ever been assembled." As we follow Young's struggle to get his dissonant voice heard, joining with an anti-war veterans' group, heading to Bush's ranch in Texas to meet with Cindy Sheehan, going on a peace march in Washington, the film intersperses clips of Bush's appeal to Congress in 2002, urging them to back his desire for war, utilizing all the phony, damning pseudo-evidence of WMD and Saddam's desire for world domination at his disposal. Fortunately, in stark contrast to Bennett and Bush, there stands West Virginia's Robert Byrd, in his 48th year as a senator, trembling with age and fury, shaking his finger at his congress not to fall pray to Bush's scare tactics. Too bad it wasn't enough.

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