Mark Reviews Movies: THE LAST FULL MEASURE

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2020

Stories matter—not only for the people who hear them, but also for those doing the telling. The Last Full Measure is a film about a single story, told from multiple perspectives but with every viewpoint on the event leading to one conclusion: A single man, going above and beyond his duty, saved and changed the lives of many people during one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.

The man was William H. Pitsenbarger, an enlisted member of the United States Air Force Pararescue service. On April 11, 1966, he and the rest of the crew of a rescue helicopter flew to the site of an ambush, in which a company of U.S. soldiers were overrun and outnumbered by Viet Cong fighters. Pitsenbarger, realizing that the men on the ground needed medical assistance, had his crewmen lower him into the fight. He treated those most in need, got them lifted to the helicopter, and got back to work.

At a certain point after taking fire, the helicopter had to leave. Despite the calls from above for Pitsenbarger to return to the vehicle, he waved the helicopter away. There still were soldiers in need of help, and he wasn't going to leave them behind. He was killed in the battle, working to save the lives of men whom he had never met.

There are two narrative threads happening simultaneously in writer/director Todd Robinson's film. The main one has a Department of Defense lawyer named Scott Huffman (Sebastian Stan) working on a recommendation to grant Pitsenbarger a posthumous Medal of Honor. The attorney, an ambitious career man who sees his boss' imminent retirement as an opportunity to move up in the ranks at the Pentagon, starts his assignment with the attitude that it's just busywork.

It doesn't matter to him on a personal level, because the battle happened decades ago. On the political side of things, the petition probably won't work, because Pitsenbarger already received a posthumous Air Force commendation and, while the Medal of Honor isn't exclusively for officers, it's rare for an enlisted service member to receive it.

As one might expect, this part of the story has Scott, who also has to consider his pregnant wife and young son in terms of how far he's willing to take the campaign for Pitsenbarger's recognition, becoming increasingly invested in the petition. He learns that some things are worth the fight, despite the potential consequences.

This is mostly what we expect from the story as soon as William is introduced. Indeed, Robinson's screenplay puts assorted obstacles in the protagonist's path as he gets closer and closer to realizing that jeopardizing his own ambitions is nothing compared to Pitsenbarger's sacrifice. The film is "inspired by" a true story, so we suspect a good portion of this third-act conflict is the product of the filmmaker's own inspiration (There are even hints of a conspiracy, involving a retired colonel, now a U.S. Senator, who ordered the company to the site of the eventual ambush).

Scott is much better presented as a stand-in for the audience—a witness, not to the politics and controversies and barriers of the Medal of Honor campaign, but to a series of stories. The other narrative thread has Scott visiting with Vietnam veterans who were there for Pitsenbarger's rescue mission. It encompasses flashbacks of that battle, as those survivors, now 33 years older and still dealing with the psychological fallout of the war, tell Pitsenbarger's story as they saw it that day.

Their stories, told by a group of notable actors, are the ones that really matter here, and Robinson takes that thread a step further than we might anticipate, given how much of the narrative weight is placed on Scott's transformation. The heart of the film is in these stories, communicated by physically and psychologically wounded men, and why the telling of those stories is vital—for history, yes, but also for hope, if only in some small measure.

During the credits, we hear from the real veterans who witnessed and were saved by Pitsenbarger's selfless actions. While some of the story's late politicking feels like screenwriting invention, there's no denying the genuine sense of pain, regret, anger, guilt, and grief that comes from these stories and the characters—still possessing a multitude of visible and invisible scars from the war—who tell them.

Those characters include Takoda (Samuel L. Jackson), who spends his days with his grandchildren and his nights making silent phone calls to the Pitsenbarger family, and Mott (Ed Harris), who drives a school bus and has yet to feel like anything other than a coward for failing to deliver Pitsenbarger's final letter home. Burr (the late Peter Fonda) sleeps during the day, because the night—when he stands guard over his farm with a shotgun in hand—still terrifies him. Tulley (William Hurt) was in the helicopter with Pitsenbarger, and he's now a nurse, caring for his fellow airman's father Frank (Christopher Plummer), who has cancer but is holding on for a final recognition of his son's ultimate sacrifice. The stories, Frank tells a still-skeptical Scott, are important, because they keep his son—who should have had more stories than the ones the father can remember—alive.

The most fascinating section, though, belongs to Kepper (John Savage), a retired officer who moved to Vietnam, near the location of the ambush. He shows Scott the place, now turned into a butterfly garden, and the contradiction of the past and present is staggering. The Last Full Measure is, at its core, about that contradiction—that, in stories of pain and loss, one can find healing and some form of peace in the telling.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products