The Casualties of Docudrama

War is still hell, even when the battlefield is docudrama, and the casualty may be truth. But whose truth? And so on and so on.

Yes, that debate again.

Docudramas are stories that purport to factually depict real events. In other words, they’re advertised as video histories, with actors playing actual people, in contrast to historical dramas that use true settings merely as backdrops for imaginary characters (“Gone With the Wind,” for instance).

Some of us are accused of being too fussy about this. Lighten up on the literal, some filmmakers argue. Who’s to care if details are fudged here and there? The spirit of the truth, they insist, is all that matters.

Don’t buy it, for that will be the case only when colleges start awarding degrees in the Spirit of History. Or when you see a biography titled “The Spirit of the Truth About the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”

The issue arises because of two ambitious docudramas arriving this weekend, both of which are commentaries on the conduct of war.

One is Showtime’s “Thanks of a Grateful Nation,” which uses actual cases to trace the horrific malady known as Gulf War Syndrome and how its victims were later callously snubbed by the government.

But a more likely powder keg is “A Bright Shining Lie,” HBO’s Vietnam movie that has already drawn fire from author David Halberstam, who covered that conflict for the New York Times, and most strongly from Daniel Ellsberg of “Pentagon papers” fame.

Both were well-acquainted with the HBO movie’s central character, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, a bold, dedicated warrior who clashes here with U.S. leaders over the means to achieve victory, but never stops believing “we can win this thing.” Vann, played persuasively by Bill Paxton, died in a chopper crash in 1972.

Ellsberg has charged the movie with giving a “false and defamatory impression” of Vann, with whom he served in Vietnam as a civilian. In the film, Vann’s civilian cohort, played by Eric Bogosian, is named Doug Elders. He and a New York Times reporter given the name of Steven Burnett (Donal Logue) are the story’s conscience. “We’re losing our souls here,” Elders reminds Vann when his friend seems desensitized to the human carnage of Vietnam. Ellsberg told The Times recently that he disputes the film’s portrayal of Vann “as a barbarian at the end.”

This debate notwithstanding, “A Bright Shining Lie” is vastly more watchable than the apparently uncontested “Thanks of a Grateful Nation,” a good-hearted but often plodding movie about the plight of the many U.S. troops and their families who unknowingly drifted under the potentially lethal cloud of Gulf War Syndrome. While these soldiers were kicking ass in the desert in 1991, it appears that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s toxic chemical agents were silently kicking their asses, something unknown to them until the sickness set in after the joyous homecoming parades. And something an unresponsive U.S. government refused to acknowledge until years later.

After some initial meandering, John Sacret Young’s script settles on the tragedies of two families. After his triumphant return from the Persian Gulf War, Army man Chris Small (Matt Keeslar) is losing weight and energy in Memphis, and his wife, Teri (Jennifer Jason Leigh), suffers many of the same disturbing symptoms. And in Waco, Texas, Jerrilinn Folz (Marg Helgenberger) watches her civilian brother, Jeran Gallimore (Steven Weber), get sicker and sicker after returning from a postwar cleanup effort in the Gulf. Both families get the runaround from government doctors. Gulf War Syndrome? What Gulf War Syndrome?

Acting on behalf of the mysteriously ailing multitudes, meanwhile, is U.S. Sen. Donald Riegle (Brian Dennehy) and his legislative assistant, Jim Tuite (Ted Danson), who crash into a stone wall of politics and bureaucracy.

Leigh and Helgenberger are especially notable in a strong cast, and “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” turns out to be about as sad as stories get. Mostly, though, we’re reminded here that worthy causes do not necessarily equal worthy drama.

In this case, Rod Holcomb directs a narrative that is repeatedly interrupted by depictions of congressional hearings whose time frame is unclear, and by anecdotal cut-ins from actual victims and other real persons connected to the story. It’s like being on an elevator that stops on every floor.

Nonetheless, there’s plenty to chew on here. Governments that lie to the people they’re pledged to serve are the heavies of both docudramas, each affirming just how many hundreds of miles HBO and Showtime have zoomed ahead of the major commercial networks in taking risks by creating movies with provocative themes. These networks, poor babies, pout profusely about HBO annually earning oodles of major Emmys, for example, yet choose not to make the same creative and budgetary commitments that HBO does. So let them stew.

Big budgets don’t routinely yield big results. Yet HBO did invest a whopping $14 million in “A Bright Shining Lie,” its costliest film to date, these millions spent on a fine-looking drama that’s based on Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.”

Bolstered by Paxton’s sturdy performance, this is one of the better films on Vietnam, largely because it is swift-moving, incisive and attentive both to how the U.S. carried out the war and to its military’s revolving door command.

Unfortunately, “A Bright Shining Lie” is not at all illuminating when it comes to explaining what the United States hoped to gain in Vietnam, and thus what Vann himself thought “winning” would achieve or why he was so fervent.

America tiptoed into Indochina after the defeated French left, ultimately igniting what would become one of the most fiery and volatile periods in U.S. history. Director-writer Terry George has Vann’s personal story arcing nearly the entirety of America’s debacle in Vietnam that bled through the 1960s and into the ‘70s.

Vann arrives in Saigon in 1962 as one of 11,000 U.S. military “advisors” to South Vietnamese forces opposing a Viet Cong insurrection led by the North Vietnamese communists. He is appalled at the U.S.-sustained Saigon regime’s corruption and its military leaders’ incompetence and dishonesty in fabricating victories and body counts on behalf of a Pentagon hoping to deceive the public.

Vann’s protests anger his superiors, who serve the very political lie that he wants to expose, and his candor with reporters about what is really happening in Vietnam virtually ends his military career. So his second Vietnam tour is as a civilian with the State Department’s aid program, although he later is given military duties and, quite amazingly, is designated a general, something else the movie fails to clarify.

Vann has a dark side here, one that evolves murkily. His wife (Amy Madigan) divorces him because of his incessant womanizing (including an earlier fling with a 15-year-old baby-sitter) and his choosing of career over family. Then, rather late in the film, he has to be prodded by the Elders character to return to the United States for the funeral of his mother, whose life as a prostitute he recalls with bitterness.

However, Ellsberg told The Times earlier that Vann never spoke harshly of his mother, and in fact arranged and paid for her funeral, rushing home for it.

George said in a Times story that he created the scene to suggest the traumatic childhood that shaped Vann’s life. “No matter how much anyone loves their mother, if she’s a prostitute, there’s no way you couldn’t have revulsion toward that,” he said.

And if not, well, Vann is not around to dispute it.

* “A Bright Shining Lie” premieres at 9 p.m. Saturday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-LV (may not be suitable for children under the age of 17, with advisories for coarse language and violence).

* “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14).