The film begins in March 2003, when American commanders launched the invasion of Iraq by sending 300,000 troops into battle. Among them was Marine Lance Corporal José Antonio Gutierrez, a native of Guatemala who had enlisted in the United States military as a "green-card soldier," promised a fast track to citizenship when his service was over. Just hours after the invasion started, Gutierrez was world famous as the first American killed--which wasn't quite accurate, since officially he wasn't a US citizen. Before long the official account of his life became more elaborate and idealistic, portraying him as a hard-working Latino who traveled north in search of the fabled American dream.
The official stories about Gutierrez weren't as counterfactual as the more famous myths circulated by US authorities about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, but they were imprecise and incomplete, to put it mildly. Specogna shows why, delving into Gutierrez's personal history as well as social and political factors that lay far beyond his control but strongly affected the course of his life. These include Guatemala's unstable and sometimes violent living conditions, which Specogna traces partly to US interference in the nation's affairs. Gutierrez knew little or nothing of what caused his country's problems, but he was well acquainted with the misery that flourished there. His family broke up when he was a child, and he grew up largely on the mean streets of an uncaring city, supplemented by periods in an orphanage and in foster homes. He acquired plenty of street smarts during all this, as the director of the orphanage says with a touch of admiration, but it wasn't a safe or easy way for a kid to go through childhood.
At some point Gutierrez got the idea of joining the large number of Guatemalans who head every year to Mexico and then the United States, hoping to sneak across the border and start a new, more comfortable life. Like many of these travelers, Gutierrez made part of the journey by hopping onto railroad cars, which routinely causes accidents resulting in the loss of life or limbs; one segment of the film shows a hospital full of amputees laid low by such mishaps. Gutierrez made it safely to his destination, only to find that life for an illegal immigrant in America isn't much easier than life in his native country, especially when his English is limited and he has few marketable skills. Since he looked younger than his age, Guttierez took advantage of youth services by passing himself off as a minor, but these benefits eventually ended. Although he dreamed of studying architecture in college, and the hard knocks of military life were the last thing he wanted, he decided a hitch in the Marines was the best of the few options available to him. Contrary to the impression created by the propaganda surrounding his death, he was a warrior by default, not by choice. On top of all this, a fellow combatant reveals that he was killed not by enemy forces but by friendly fire from another Marine; and although the military buried him with pomp and circumstance, the year of birth carved on his gravestone is wrong by four years-the final grim irony in Gutierrez's brief, unhappy career.
Specogna sketches Gutierrez's biography through photos and interviews with people who knew him. Only a limited amount of such material is available, though, so Specogna fleshes it out by veering frequently away from Gutierrez's own story and showing other refugees undergoing experiences like the ones Gutierrez had. This sidesteps the problem of documenting a life that left few documents behind, and expands the film's frame of reference to include a whole class of people facing similar challenges and disadvantages.
Trying not to seem ideological or contentious, Specogna has given The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez a quiet, detached, and undemonstrative tone. Her moderation is understandable, but it drains away much of the picture's potential power; moments that should soar on wings of outrage become slow and underwhelming. This makes the film something of a missed opportunity, since apart from Gutierrez's role in the Iraq war, he was a complex and contradictory person in some ways-reluctant to speak English, for example, despite his hankering for a fully American life. Specogna does little analysis of how the Iraq invasion chewed up the lives of countless other green-card soldiers, including some 32,000 Latinos, and she doesn't tell just how US government propaganda put such a self-serving spin on Gutierrez's story, even though her own documentary also takes advantage of his unwanted fame-she has a longtime interest in Latin American subjects, but in the DVD's main extra (the others are trailers) she tells a Sundance Film Festival interviewer that she wouldn't have received funding if Gutierrez had been the second or third Iraq casualty rather than the first. Still and all, if you take the film on its own understated terms, you're certain to learn from it.
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by David Sterritt
