If you have any sense of how the U.S. military protects both its own and itself -- its image, its insularity and its sense of entitlement -- very little in Amir Bar-Lev's documentary The Tillman Story will surprise you. But The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR -- and not human lives -- were the most important consideration during wartime.
In 2002 Pat Tillman walked away from a multimillion-dollar career in the National Football League to join the Army Rangers, refusing to give any detailed public explanation for his decision. In late April 2004, Americans at home heard the news -- sad and shocking largely because this was a soldier with a name we could easily put a face to -- that Tillman had been killed in an ambush by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The military's official account of his death painted him as a heroic leader; he received a laudatory memorial service and a Silver Star.
Five weeks later, military officials announced that Tillman had, in fact, been killed by friendly fire. The subtext -- so blatant you can hardly call it a subtext -- is that the military had spun this sad event to serve its own purposes, using the death of this by all accounts likeable, intelligent, principled soldier as a public relations tool, a way of polishing up, in the public's eyes, the glory and integrity of the American military.
The Tillman Story focuses on that cover-up, and particularly on the dogged efforts of Tillman's parents, Mary "Dannie" Tillman, formerly a special-education teacher, and Patrick Tillman Sr., a lawyer, to first find out what really happened to their son and then to hold the military accountable for its deceit. The fact that they're only semi-successful at both is part of what makes The Tillman Story so affecting: Bar-Lev lays the story out in the coolest terms, including interviews with Tillman's widow, Marie, who fiercely protects her husband's privacy but also drops subtle clues about what kind of guy he was; his younger brother, Richard, who suffered a telling, and poignantly justified, mini-meltdown during Tillman's official memorial service; two of the Rangers who were close to Tillman and knew the truth about his death even as the Army asked them to cover it up; and a blogger and former special-ops soldier, the extremely wry Stan Goff, who helped Dannie sift through thousands of pages of redacted documents to unearth some of the seedier secrets behind Tillman's death.
Conspicuously absent from these interviews is Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother -- the two enlisted together, just months after Pat and Marie's wedding. But Kevin does make an appearance late in the film, in footage of the Congressional hearings investigating (and, infuriatingly, exonerating) military officials involved in the cover-up, and his pained and painful testimony is all the explanation we need for his reticence in speaking up about what happened to his brother. (Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also shows up in that footage, triggering that peculiar effect you get when you see a despised news figure who's been out of the public eye for a while: He's like the memory of a meal that gave you food poisoning.)
Bar-Lev -- whose previous directing credits include the 2007 My Kid Could Paint That -- trusts his instincts enough to know that he doesn't need to embellish or intensify any angle of this story to make it more dramatic or more affecting. His treatment of Tillman's parents is particularly low-key. Dannie Tillman, who has since written a book about her son's case, speaks at one point about how uncomfortable it is to be a parent grieving intensely and privately in the midst of a grand and glitzy public outpouring of grief. Against that, Bar-Lev shows footage of Dannie, Patrick Sr. and Marie standing stiffly and politely on a football field as earnest speeches are made and marching-band music is played. At one point, incomprehensibly, a team of prancing and high-kicking dancers line up before them, a truly weird way of honoring a fallen soldier.
The Tillman Story is often painful to watch, even when the images in front of us are nothing more than military documents that have been marked, by Dannie, with a highlighter. Dannie was given thousands of pages of official reports and documents by the U.S. military, a sea of pages with every significant name or detail blacked out; the presumption was that once she started going through this material, she'd simply become exhausted and give up. But with Goff's help, Dannie unearthed many of the more excruciating secrets surrounding her son's death, notably the fact that the soldiers responsible for it (their story isn't told here, and appears to be wholly shrouded in secrecy) explained their actions by saying, "I was excited," and, "I wanted to stay in the firefight" -- details the U.S. military wouldn't be particularly eager to publicize, for obvious reasons, and which can only intensify a parent's suffering.
Bar-Lev recently lost an appeal to have the MPAA ratings board change the rating for The Tillman Story from an R -- for the movie's use of, as the ratings board so delicately puts it, "excessive language" -- to a PG-13. That's particularly cutting considering that one of the most piercing revelations in The Tillman Story is that Tillman's last words, shouted out as a last-ditch effort to keep his fellow soldiers from shooting at him, were "I'm Pat f*cking Tillman." Sometimes the use of an expletive, beyond being a sticking point for a group of de facto censors, really is a matter of life and death.