By Raphaela Weissman

Body of War
Directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue
at IFC Center

Why can’t documentary filmmakers comprehend the concept of less is more? In Body of War, directors Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue suffocate one soldier’s moving story with a musty political history lesson. In 2001, moved by Bush’s speeches after 9/11, Tomas Young, then 22, enlisted in the Army in hopes of fighting in Afghanistan. Instead, in 2004, he was shipped to Iraq, where he was shot after less than a week and paralyzed from spinal damage. Young’s heartbreaking experience so aptly captures the folly of the Iraq war and the arrogance of the Bush administration that a documentary about his life after the war would be indelably powerful on its own. Unfortunately, Spiro and Donahue bolster Young’s story with one we already know, about the 2002 congressional vote on the Iraq resolution.

Body of War, at its best, is an extreme close-up on one person— down to a scene in which Young’s mother inserts his catheter in the back of their minivan. Spiro and Donahue could not have written a better subject for a soldier’s story: Young, despite the crippling damage done to his body is good-natured, charming and well-spoken. At a speaking engagement, between dizzy spells caused by his body’s inability to regulate its temperature, he tells the audience that he may stutter through his speech, “so you’ll forgive my sounding a bit Presidential.” After returning from Iraq, he became an avid anti-war activist, one of many rich ironies in the Young family: his mother, who’s outspoken about her disgust with the Bush administration, is married to a conservative Republican; and Tomas’ brother Nathan, who’s also in the military, ships off to Iraq during the filming of the movie.

With all this fascinating real-life material to work with, it’s frustrating that the directors choose to devote half of the movie to well-worn archival footage of members of congress debating the decision to invade Iraq in 2002. The condescending implication that we couldn’t have made the connection between the Iraq resolution and Tomas’ current predicament on our own is symptomatic of an overzealous documentary. Spiro and Donahue have become enamored with the poetic potential of their subject, to the detriment of the subject itself. Body of War makes us wish we’d just attended one of Tomas’ engagements ourselves, so that he could tell us his own story, free from the screaming messages surrounding it.