Will a Documentary About John Kerry have Any Effect on the Upcoming US Election?

America’s Hearts of Darkness

Will a Documentary About John Kerry have Any Effect on the Upcoming US Election?

by Liam Lacey

One of the most anticipated political documentaries of the fall, director George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, has its world premiere this evening at the Toronto International Film Festival. The occasion will launch a campaign that will see it released in U.S. theatres on Oct. 1, the day after the first presidential debate, as the election enters its homestretch.

The setting may be almost as significant as the timing: As Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times on Sunday, the film is being launched "in a country that is itself synonymous with anti-Vietnam protest." Canada, which declined to join George W. Bush’s "coalition of the willing" in invading Iraq, again stands on the side of American dissent.

This isn’t the first time there has been a Canadian angle to American political documentaries. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine was produced by Canadians. Both Moore and Butler are enthusiastic about their attachment to Canada. The distributors of Going Upriver are Canadian as well. Jeff Sackman, founder of Going Upriver’s Canadian-based ThinkFilm distribution company, hopes it gets the kind of media bounce that turned Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 into a $100-million box-office hit, though Butler’s film is less of a populist rouser.

Moore’s film was rhetorical, agit-prop, satirically broad. Butler’s film is sobering, a reminder for lessons in American foreign policy never properly learned, of lies perpetuated. Rather than name-calling or mocking Kerry’s opponents, Butler raises and dignifies the level of discourse about Vietnam, its effect on American politics and life. In a wiser world, Going Upriver should also put to rest the question of Kerry’s war record.

Butler, who is about Kerry’s age, avoided the draft by joining a group called Vista, similar to the Peace Corps. He worked as a photographer, then a filmmaker. He is responsible for the 1977 hit, Pumping Iron, which first made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name (he predicted in the late seventies that Schwarzenegger would some day become the governor of California). He also made the archival documentary, The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000), rated as one of the year’s top 10 film by several critics.

I reached Butler on his cellphone during his drive to the airport to fly to Toronto. Butler is quick to say he dismisses any idea that he made the film in an attempt to influence voters.

"I made this film because I’m an old friend of John Kerry’s, because he’s a person of great character, like Schwarzenegger and Shackleton, and because it’s a good story," he said. "Anyone who sets out to influence an election with a film is a fool. I set out to make a very good movie which may have some unpredictable effect.

"When I made Pumping Iron, the effect was that 100,000 gyms instantly opened across the United States."

Going Upriver provides an inspiring portrait of Kerry, both for his war record and his antiwar record. Butler, using a vast store of archival material, including some 35 years (or 40 hours) of film and numerous photos he took of Kerry, shows the future presidential candidate in Vietnam. He shows him returning and becoming a leader of the Vietnam veterans’ antiwar movement and his riveting television testimony, at age 27, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And it shows the scene where Kerry and the other vets protested the war by throwing their medals and ribbons over a fence onto the Capitol steps. Kerry’s opponents have harped on this moment, insisting it indicates Kerry’s questionable patriotism.

Rather than some flippant defiant gesture, the sequence is wrenching: The men dedicate their medals to dead friends; one-by-one they testify to their bitterness and disillusion at being asked to murder and risk their own lives for a false cause, before tossing their honours away.

"I don’t tell anyone what to think. I leave it up to their choice," says Butler. "I show what happened. When you see the bullets flying in Vietnam, you know he was there and in great danger."

We learn, from his colleagues, how Kerry volunteered to command one of the patrol boats that were sent up the Mekong River, surrounded by dense jungle, mostly for the purpose of drawing enemy fire. Swift boats in Kerry’s division had casualty rates as high as 90 per cent; he himself was wounded three times in a four-month period.

Much of this footage has never been seen before, though the real breaking news is the history of John O’Neill, a Vietnam vet and co-author of the anti-Kerry book, Unfit for Command, and one of the leaders of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization responsible for running a series of attack ads questioning Kerry’s war record. O’Neill first began attacking Kerry in 1971 as part of President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks campaign. We listen in to the White House tapes as Nixon plots with later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and Charles Colson, to counteract Kerry’s charisma with O’Neill.

"O’Neill hasn’t changed in 30 years. He’s just better paid now," says Butler.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0914-04.htm