110 min | R | January 24, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
A Pentagon careerist gets stuck with a dead-end assignment: investigate a thirty-year-old medal request for an airman killed in Vietnam. The deeper he digs, the more he understands why the government wanted it buried. The story is true and powerful. The film keeps reaching for the violins anyway.
Scott Huffman is a Pentagon staffer chasing a promotion when he draws an assignment nobody wants. He must investigate a thirty-year-old request to upgrade a dead airman’s medal to the Medal of Honor. The airman is William H. Pitsenbarger, a pararescueman who dropped into a Vietnam firefight, saved dozens of soldiers, and stayed behind to die with the men he could not carry out. Huffman treats it as a box to check until the surviving veterans force him to understand what the paperwork represents. The film is about bureaucratic delay as a form of cowardice, and about how a government buries valor when honoring it would cost someone an admission.
Sebastian Stan plays Huffman with careerist impatience that slowly cracks into something like shame. He starts as a man who reads files and ends as a man who listens to them. Christopher Plummer plays Frank Pitsenbarger, the dying father, with a stillness that refuses to beg. He wants the medal for his son and he will not perform grief to get it. Ed Harris, William Hurt, and Samuel L. Jackson play the surviving veterans as men who carry the same day in different ways. Harris seethes, Hurt withdraws, and Jackson erupts. Jeremy Irvine plays the airman himself in the flashbacks, calm in a way that reads as either heroism or acceptance.
Todd Robinson directs and writes, and his structure leans hard on the flashback. He cuts between Huffman’s present-day interviews and the 1966 battle, reconstructing the same firefight from multiple memories. The combat staging is competent and frank about the chaos of men pinned in tall grass. The problem is the script’s reliance on the swelling score to tell the audience what to feel. Robinson stages a genuinely moving true story and then underlines every beat, as if he distrusts the material to land on its own.
The performances carry weight the writing does not earn. The veteran cast turns thin scenes into something that holds, and the film gains an unintended gravity as one of the final appearances for Peter Fonda and William Hurt. Robinson clearly reveres his subject, and that reverence is both the film’s engine and its limit. He honors Pitsenbarger sincerely and conventionally, smoothing a hard story into a respectful one. The man deserved the medal. He also deserved a film willing to trust his story without the strings.