Documentary reveals details of death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman

Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev's "The Tillman Story," opening Friday, reveals in horrifying detail facts surrounding the 2004 killing of former football star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman by friendly fire on an Afghanistan mountainside.

The powerful documentary also traces the rush to cover up those facts by high-ranking military officers (including Gen. Stanley McChrystal) and members of George W. Bush's administration (among them then- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld).

Above all, the film leads us into the private anguish of Tillman's family, who ultimately learn that Pentagon officials promoted a false version of Corporal Tillman's fate suggesting he was cut down, not by fratricide, but by the enemy while protecting his men.

What "The Tillman Story" does not do is dwell on reconstructing what sort of man its subject was. Considering how intensely the media embraced the Army's public-relations tale of heroic sacrifice, one might wonder why Bar-Lev's portrait of the onetime Arizona Cardinals linebacker stops at providing only an impression of the real Tillman's charisma and thoughtfulness.

"When you turn someone into a symbol, you appropriate him," says Bar-Lev by phone from New York. "We were hoping to give Pat back to his family, whose grief was trounced with platitudes. That direction was more interesting than mythologizing him further. There is something about not dissecting Pat that, in a counterintuitive way, gives you a sense of who he was."

Not that Bar-Lev wasn't tempted. But with Tillman's rise as a national, patriotic emblem, he says, Tillman's family "could feel their memories of him slipping away from them." At one point (not seen in the film) the director said to Tillman's widow, Marie, "I understand Pat was an avid reader."

"Doesn't everybody read?" Marie countered.

"We made a conscious decision not to refract Pat's human traits and make them larger-than-life," Bar-Lev says.

"The Tillman Story" took three years to make, and involved gaining the trust of his family, who, says Bar-Lev, "have a healthy sense of what's public and what's private. They didn't feel the need to prove they miss him.

"They knew we had to explore his personality somewhat," he says, "but they only wanted that to be one pillar. The real story is what the cover-up did to the country, and whether we're going to let the government lie to us shamelessly about the war. It's not about what we owe Pat, it's what we owe ourselves."

"The Tillman Story" was slapped with an R rating for language, making it a little more difficult for young people to see.

"It's uncanny how fitting that decision was," says Bar-Lev. "This is what the movie is about: sanitized versions of war. The idea we're protecting kids from the way people talk when they're shot at or grieving is ludicrous."

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com.