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First printed at www.movingpicturesnetwork.com

Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(From the Palm Springs International Film Festival 2009)

Director: Susan Morgan Cooper
Starring: Eddie Adams, Kiefer Sutherland (narrator), Tom Brokaw, Morley Safer, Peter Jennings, Peter Arnett, Bob Schieffer, Gordon Parks

As Kiefer Sutherland’s distinctive tones utter in the opening frames, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eddie Adams photographed 13 wars, 6 presidents and every major film star to go in front of a camera in 50 years. He saw the world in his distinctive black-and-white tones, but lived it in the grays: a press core “ragamuffin” working for Associated Press.

Showing him fatigue-bearing, .45-wearing, with four cameras swinging around his neck, this tribute to Adams is as much an education about what it meant to be a newswire lensman as it is a profile of the powerful personality that was the man who took that shot of the South Vietnamese general blowing the brains out of a Vietnamese man and thus personified a war waged in brutal face-to-face proximity… and won the Pulitzer for bearing witness to the murder, making a monster of the man who held the gun and a martyr of the man who bore the bullet.

But Adams wasn’t impressed by the image. “It’s not a great work of art… the light wasn’t right… the composition was terrrible… I guess it was a moment that was very important… I’m not sure why… it helped end the war in Vietnam?… I really don’t understand a lot of it.” Brokaw and co. confirm that the image confused the relevance of the war for many people back in the U.S., confirming the fruitlessness of it all. And, together with Nick Ute’s photograph of a young, naked girl running from a napalm attack, Adams’s image came to define the visual element of the war in Vietnam.

Morgan Cooper presents the footage in all its gory honesty, and comprehensively captures conversations with a seeming majority of the men and women of that time. She also captures the effect of that triggered moment on the culture of the day and since, and on the life of the single man behind the camera.

There is no doubt from the documentary that Vietnam defined Eddie Adams, but Morgan Cooper does well to dive into the work Eddie did in China, in Cuba, and with everyone from world leaders and the greatest of jazz greats to centerfold angels to a miner and his donkey. And the film also does well to not dwell in the errors of other legacy filmmakers by eulogizing the now-deceased photographer only in terms of endearment.

There’s no stylistic pioneering being premiered by the helmer in her feature, but who needs tricks when you’ve got great images, great stories and great characters for whom storytelling (and living lives worthy of stories being told) is not only a profession but a provocative passion?

Eddie may have wanted to title a book containing his photography of human rights pioneers as “Solidiers Without Guns,” but “Soldiers Without Bullets” may have been more appropriate – for the gun shows the man willing to fight, but the bullets, well, the bullets were just too heavy.