Medal for mettle’s sake
‘The Last Full Measure’ strikes a delicate balance in telling a story
William H. Pitsenbarger had a posthumous problem. In 1966, the 21-year-old U.S. Air Force para-rescuer was killed in action in Vietnam after coming to the aid of Army soldiers pinned down by enemy fire. He had elected to stay on the ground when his helicopter had to leave.
He was awarded the Air Force Cross for heroism, but his Army comrades thought he deserved the Medal of Honor.
But by 1999, with no upgrade in sight, it was difficult to rouse much enthusiasm for a long-dead soldier from an unpopular conflict.
Todd Robinson, writer/ director of The Last Full Measure , has a similar problem. Not only does he have to tell the story of Pitsenbarger’s exploits, and the push to see him properly honoured; he has to make audiences another 20 years in the future care about the outcome. And while the story he tells is interesting, it falls short of the powerful sentiment for which it’s so clearly reaching.
His “inspired by a true story” screenplay takes a few liberties – though none, as near as I could tell, with Pitsenbarger’s exploits.
As played by Jeremy Irvine in flashback, he was clearly a selfless soldier. When his body was discovered after the battle in which he saved at least nine men, it was clutching a rifle in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
But in Robinson’s version, the task of investigating his worthiness for a Medal of Honour falls to Pentagon upand-comer Scott Huffman (Sebastian Stan), who puts his career on the line as he interviews Vietnam vets and discovers, if not quite a conspiracy, then an unwillingness to honour mere enlisted airmen with the nation’s highest personal military decoration. (A post-credit sequence notes that of almost 3,500 recipients, only three fall into this category.)
The reality was a little less screen-worthy – military historian W. Parker Hayes Jr. came across Pitsenbarger’s story while working at the Airmen Memorial Museum in the late ’90s, wrote a short biography of the man, and then started interviewing survivors and putting together the Medal of Honor recommendation.
The interviews make up the bulk of The Last Full Measure , and feature a who’s who of elder stars – Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, William Hurt, John Savage and Peter Fonda in his final role.
They do a respectable mix of bitter, cranky, squirrelly, haunted and grief-stricken as they relive their memories, while the movie obligingly cranks back to younger actors in flashbacks, in what unfortunately resembles merely a second-rate Vietnam War movie.
Egged on by the dead airman’s parents (Christopher Plummer and Diane Ladd), who want their son to be properly honoured while they’re still alive, Huffman digs deep into the war, going so far as to visit a Col. Kurtzian figure who has retired to Vietnam to grapple with his memories of the conflict.
It’s a quirky mix of Beltway politics and combat scenes as Huffman works his way toward a conclusion – triumphant or mournful I shall not reveal. And while you may not be fully engaged by the drama of the telling, it at least makes a decent case for its central argument.
If Forrest Gump can get the Medal of Honor almost by accident, surely this real hero deserves one too.