The Last Full Measure

Posted on January 23, 2020 at 5:41 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for war violence and language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Smoking, medication
Violence/ Scariness:	Graphic and disturbing images of wartime violence, characters injured and killed, veterans with PTSD, medical issues
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 24, 2020

The story of the exceptional valor of Airman 1st Class William H. Pitsenbarger in one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, and the story of the thirty-year effort by the men he saved to see that he received recognition with a posthumus Medal of Honor are plenty dramatic, so it really wasn’t necessary to ramp it up with fictional details about a cover-up. And even an AARP A-list in the cast, including Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, John Savage, Amy Madigan, Samuel L. Jackson and Peter Fonda, each with a chance at a bravura star turn, cannot match the clips over the final credits of the real-life veterans who would not quit until his valor was acknowledged. He ie one of only three Air Force enlisted men to be awarded the Medal of Honor in military history.

So a documentary about what really happened would have been better. Instead we have a diligent, well-intentioned, if overheated story that is as much about the (fictional) Defense Department staffer who was assigned to investigate the application for the Medal of Honor, Scott Huffman (Sebastian Stan), and the lessons he learned from contact with the honor and courage of Pitsenbarger, his parents (Plummer and Ladd), and the humble but insistent men who would not quit.

The movie goes back and forth between 1966 Vietnam and 1995 Washington DC. In Vietnam, Pitsenbarger was an Air Force pararescueman, not in a combat company himself but part of a team that evacuated wounded soldiers via helicopter. In one of of the bloodiest days of the war (meaning highest US casualty count), when the Americans were being slaughtered, he rescued wounded men at great risk to his own life and then picked up a gun and fought alongside them, until he was shot and killed. These scenes are extremely violent and graphic and often hard to follow, especially since there is no effort to make the younger versions of the characters played by Fonda, Harris, Jackson, and Savage look or sound like their counterparts.

In 1995 Washington, DC, Huffman (a fictional character) is an ambitious Defense Department civilian bureaucrat with a young son and a pregnant wife (neither of whom serve any function in the story except to be adorable and supportive, with one brief pep talk. His career is in jeopardy when the political appointee who serves as Secretary of the Air Force (Linus Roache) announces that he is resigning (and yet somehow still in the job what looks like a year later at the award ceremony but okay). And when he is assigned to develop a record for the medal application, including interviewing eye witnesses and tracking down mysteriously missing paperwork.

None of this is true (and by the way, the wives of the veterans whose lives were saved also played a significant part in getting the medal), but it makes for good drama, giving each of the venerable co-stars a moment suitable for a lifetime achievement clip real. They fall at different points on the range of PTSD, but all of them end up confessing and achieving some kind of catharsis. It is poignant to see the clearly ailing Peter Fonda in his last role as the most fragile of the group. And it is a little bit surreal to see John Savage of “The Deer Hunter” back in Vietnam 42 years later. Not the “Kurtz-ian burnout smoking ganja under a bohdi tree” that Huffman imagined but someone who found peace by bringing peace to others. Ladd’s monologue about sending her teenage son to war is also a highlight, and a welcome reminder that when we say no to sending our children into battle it just means we are sending someone else’s children in their place.

It is artificial and awkward. but thankfully it does not try to make the purpose of Pitsenbarger’s story into a life lesson for a fictional civilian. A moving award ceremony at the end reminds that the purpose of any hero’s story is to give a life lesson to us.

Parensts should know that this movie includes scenes of the Vietnam war with very graphic wartime violence and disturbing images, characters injured and killed, veterans with PTSD, strong language, and smoking.

Family discussion: How did Scott change as he spoke to the veterans? What did he learn about listening from Kepper? What kind of medal would you like to earn?

If you like this, try: “Hacksaw Ridge” and “We Were Soldiers”

Tribute: Peter Fonda

Posted on August 23, 2019 at 6:18 am

We mourn the loss of Peter Fonda, a fine actor whose work was overshadowed by his Oscar-winning father, Henry Fonda, and sister, Jane Fonda. He will be best remembered for “Easy Rider,” a film that turned Hollywood upside down in the late 60’s with its fiercely independent spirit on and off-screen.

For rogerebert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes:

From the start of his stardom, the actor, director, filmmaker, producer, activist, and father of actress Bridget Fonda (“Jackie Brown,” “Point of No Return”) had a complicated vision of his time and country. It endured as he aged and started playing roles that commented on his youthful stardom. His signature works are “The Wild Angels,” “Easy Rider,”, “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,” “The Hired Hand,” “Ulee’s Gold,” “The Limey,” “Escape from L.A.,” and “Ghost Rider.” All were animated by words and phrases that might pop into the heads of Peter Fonda fans when they thought about his career: motorcycles, counterculture, hippies, drugs, alienation, chaos, romanticism, regret, philosophical reflection, world-weariness, hope, and fathers and sons.

It was just six years earlier that he played bland Sandra Dee’s bland love interest in the ultra-bland “Tammy and the Doctor.”

But then, the same year that the film of the Woodstock festival came to theaters, he co-wrote, produced, and starred in the film that was so transformative it led the title of one of the best books ever written about Hollywood history. As Variety wrote, the film “shook up Hollywood and revolutionized the country’s sense of itself….He was the youth-culture version of an icon, rebel son of the archetypal patriarch, and it meant something seismic to see a figure like this — the descendant of American royalty, who could have gone the Ivy League route, or else enlisted in Vietnam — reject his father’s relatively conservative values.” The film cost just $400,000 but made $60 million. Hollywood might not have understood the counterculture, but it understood box office economics.

In 1997, he played the title role in “Ulee’s Gold.” Director Victor Nunez remembered, “When we started shooting, he was an inspiration on the set. He did a lot of scenes with real, swarming bees. But Peter never got stung. Which says something about him as an actor — he could even charm the bees.”

May his memory be a blessing.

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