LITTLE ROCK — If you missed the brothers Brent and Craig Renaud’s latest documentary Warrior Champions: From Baghdad to Beijing at the recent Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, you’ll have another chance Thursday at its theatrical “World Premiere” at the Lakewood 8 Theater in North Little Rock. (See the note at the end of this column for details.)

Warrior Champions is easy enough to synopsize: It follows four Americans - who served in Iraq and were seriously injured - as they attempt to qualify and compete in the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games in Beijing.

Melissa Stockwell, the first American female amputee in the Iraq war, lost her left leg when a roadside bomb exploded as she was leading a convoy in Baghdad in 2004. She ran the New York City Marathon less than a year later. She’d never swam competitively before deciding to try out for the U.S. team.

In 2003, Scott Winkler was unloading an ammunition truck during a firefight near Tikrit when he was paralyzed from the waist down. After a couple of years of depression, he was introduced to adaptive discus and shot put during a paralympic sports clinic in 2006. Less than a year later he was breaking world records.

Kortney Clemons was preparing a wounded soldier for evacuation by helicopter when a bomb blew off his right leg and killed three of his fellow medics. Fitted with a carbon fiberprosthesis with a flat-spring foot, he became a national champion sprinter a few months after learning to run on the device.

Carlos Leon escaped serious injury during his tour of duty as a Marine, but weeks after returning home he broke his neck in a diving accident. Now he’s the world record holder in the adaptive discus.

The Renauds turn their cameras on these subjects and allow them to speak, and act, for themselves. And certainly the camera influences their behavior - Winkler, in particular, seems eager to perform, to come across as a tough-minded survivor who simply won’t let his bad luck keep him from overcoming and inspiring. But even his occasional preening takes on an air of poignancy,as time and time again the Renauds’ straightforward, patient camerawork reveals more than their subjects say - or probably even know about - their lives.

More than once the film recalled William Wyler’s 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives, particularly the subplot involving double-amputee sailor Homer Parrish, played by Harold Russell - an Army paratrooper who’d lost his hands when a bomb went off while he was making a training film.

Homer returns to his Midwestern home, to an aggrieved family and next-door neighbor sweetheart Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell) who promised to wait for him. But Homer doesn’t want to saddle her with a handicapped husband, and in the movie’s most memorable scene he calls her into his bedroom and sloughs off his harness and his mechanical hooks.

“This is when I know I’m helpless,” he tells her. “My hands are down there on the bed. I can’t put them on again without calling to somebody for help. I can’t smoke a cigarette or read a book. If that door should blow shut, I can’t open it and get out of this room. I’m as dependent as a baby that doesn’t know how to get anything except to cry for it. Well, now you know, Wilma. Now you have an idea of what it is. I guess you don’t know what to say. It’s all right. Go on home. Go away like your family said.”

But Wilma doesn’t leave. Instead, the movie ends at their wedding, where Homer deftly slips a ring onto her finger with his hooks. In the end, it’s Wilma’s hands that are shaking.

In an era where commercially successful documentaries are possible (if unlikely),the temptation toward firstperson polemicizing and prescriptive didacticism must be tempting. Cameras confer authority to subjects that aggressively address it, baring their teeth and unpacking the contents of their unshakably certain souls. Reality television and Michael Moore have proved that there’s an audience for declarative exhibitionism.

Yet the Renauds resist this trend, providing their audiences with nothing more than a silent eye opening on scenes of everyday eloquence. Short of covert surveillance, they get as close to the nub of authentic human operations as possible, working with small handheld cameras to give us a surrogate through which we might witness a rawer and less contrived experience than we usually see in theaters and on television. They practice a conservative brand of cinema verite, trusting inthe competence of their audience to appraise the evidence they submit.

Some people might mistake what they’re doing for something less than art. And maybe the Renauds wouldn’t disagree with that, but the truth is their films are built from carefully weighed and candled moments, chosen for their particular heft and how they relate to what’s gone before and what will come after. They bead these moments together into a narrative that tells us something about how we are. And what we might be.

Warrior Champions: From Baghdad to Beijing will screen at 7 p.m. Thursday and tickets are $100; it’s a fundraiser to raise scholarship funds for the Clinton School of Public Service. You can buy tickets at http://www.clintonschool.uasys.edu/donation/donate.asp or call (501) 683-5200.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 42 on 11/06/2009

Comments

To report abuse or misuse of this area please hit the "Suggest Removal" link in the comment to alert our online managers.

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.