Team America

An unlikely duo gives an Iraq War doc a human face.

Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro could form a mutual-admiration society. When we sat down with the former talk-show host and the documentarian at the South by Southwest Film Festival to discuss Body of War, which they codirected, almost every question to either of them elicited praise for the other. “That’s a mark of Phil’s commitment.” “Ellen’s the one who really made it happen.” The love-in is tempered with the occasional friendly joke about Donahue’s addiction to C-SPAN or Spiro’s demeanor in the editing room.

Their collaboration is a happy accident. On a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Donahue met Iraq veteran Tomas Young, who was paralyzed from the chest down by gunfire during his first week in Iraq. Young’s story haunted Donahue after that visit. “I felt like I couldn’t just leave this kid or pat him on the head. So I thought about writing a book,” recalls Donahue. “Then I met DeeDee Halleck, an activist [and filmmaker] from Woodstock, New York. She was my seatmate on an airplane, and I’m telling her about this kid I met. And I’m saying, ‘You know, I’m thinking about a book, but I’ve been in television all my life. Why don’t I do some moving pictures?’ And she immediately got out her address book and gave me Mobilus Media’s number in Austin. I called, and guess who answered.”

“I almost hung up on him,” explains Spiro. “I thought he was a prank caller. It couldn’t really be Phil Donahue, because Phil Donahue is, like, this fictional character.” Luckily, Donahue convinced her that it really was him, and soon she agreed to meet Young.

Spiro immediately saw how compelling Young would be on film. “I knew when I met Tomas—even though he was pretty hooked on morphine at the beginning of this project—that his story was going to be interesting,” she says.

The more time Spiro and Donahue spent with Young, the more interesting his story became. In addition to weaning himself from morphine, getting married and seeing his brother enlist in the army, Young became a vocal antiwar activist.

As the project developed, Donahue had a vision of counterpointing Young’s story with an examination of the congressional resolution that granted President Bush the power to go to war. So, while Spiro was spending time with Young, the self-avowed C-SPAN junkie Donahue combed through hundreds of hours of floor debates to demonstrate how the administration developed a set of talking points that senators and representatives happily parroted.

Donahue also focuses on the 23 senators, led by elder statesman Robert Byrd, who opposed granting Bush war powers. Byrd’s passionate oratory about the founding fathers and the essence of democracy creates a powerful backdrop for the story of war’s impact on Young.

If Byrd is an old-style firebrand, Young has a compelling charisma of his own. At his numerous public appearances, people are drawn to Young. “They don’t know what to do; they don’t know whether to be sad or angry,” notes Donahue. “Old women hug Tomas; they can’t keep their hands off him. And he accepts it; he gets it.” That’s captured in one moving scene, where Tomas tries to balance his own needs (he tires easily and is prone to dangerous overheating because his injuries damaged his body’s ability to regulate temperature) with people’s deep need to talk to him and touch him—especially the wives and mothers of soldiers currently deployed overseas.

Spiro doesn’t shy away from the practical challenges of a paraplegic. Young openly discusses such painful and private topics as erectile dysfunction and the limits of his sex life to the difficulties of properly inserting a urinary catheter.

When we ask about the weak performance of Iraq docs at the box office, Spiro has a reasonable answer: “I think they’re lacking human stories. Granted, there’s a lot of ground to cover, so a lot of them are like academic essays; they touch on all the points but don’t reach the heart. Our film reaches the heart.”

Young’s story may reach the heart, but he’s not looking for pity. “What Ellen did here would certainly stand out on a personal level,” says Donahue. “But Tomas wanted a political film, and I did too. Tomas did not want a ‘poor lad, how sad’ kind of movie. No telethons for Tomas. Tomas wants to stop this war.”

Body of War opens Friday.

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