"The Tillman Story": The reviews
For whatever reason, The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary on the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan and the by all accounts tragically, perhaps criminally, mishandled aftermath, hasn’t opened in Arizona yet.
It’s screened for critics once, and at least once for the ASU football team, but as yet I haven’t heard of any local special screenings before its scheduled opening Sept. 3.
It’s showing in New York, however. The reviews have been exceedingly positive—though note the one exception below, from the New York Post.
You can see the trailer here. The full Metacritic page is here.
Here are some of the first reviews:
Mr. Bar-Lev’s clearsighted, emotionally steady documentary examines the family members’ deepening inquiry into the circumstances of Tillman’s death and chronicles their mounting rage at the military’s misappropriation of his story. The film visits the canyon where he died and the soldiers who were with him and heard his final words, in which he tried to alert the unidentified troops only 40 yards away that he was on their side.
The family’s outrage over the exploitation of their son boiled over in a letter that Tillman’s father, Pat Sr., wrote accusing the military of fraud. The letter led to an internal investigation and a Congressional hearing at which military leaders were grilled on what they knew about what the family asserted was a cover-up; their memories were vague.
“The Tillman Story” is a story that won’t go away, won’t leave you alone, won’t let you feel at ease. Intensely dramatic, filled with elevated heroism, crass self-interest and blatant stupidity, it’s a paradigmatic narrative of our tendentious, turbulent times.
It’s a fascinating film, full of drama, intrigue, tragedy and righteous indignation, but maybe its greatest accomplishment is to make you feel the death of one young man — a truly independent thinker who hewed his own way through the world, in the finest American tradition — as a great loss.
‘The Tillman Story" purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces — massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.
[…]
The film dances around this point, but Tillman’s mother, who is still unsatisfied after being given 3,000 pages of documents from the Army investigation, is a George W. Bush hater. Like many before her (such as Cindy Sheehan, who said her soldier son “was murdered … to benefit Israel”), she found sorrow curdling into something more dynamic and satisfying: political rage. A military organizational chart that is topped by a photo of the then-commander in chief (cue scary music) is as close as the movie gets to painting a picture of an evil cabal headed by Bush. But fratricide, when you clear away the fog of war, is simply a gruesome accident.