Pfc. Jessica Lynch Isn't Rambo Anymore:
"…Few authors deserve book sales and attention more than this brave young woman from Palestine, W.Va., who joined the Army to see the world after failing to land a job at Wal-Mart. But now, as in every other step of her time in the spotlight, the way her story plays out may tell us more about a country at war than it does about our hero."

Take, for instance, tonight's surprising "Saving Jessica Lynch," as written by John Fasano and drawn in part from the account of Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who has written his own book about how he risked his life to lead American forces to Private Lynch. The movie begins with the inevitable disclaimer that "some characters, scenes and events in whole or in part have been created for dramatic purposes." Even so, given the facts as we know them to date, it is startling in its relative accuracy — more than earlier reportage by The Washington Post (which attributed its initial Rambo version to "U.S. officials") and The New York Times (whose reporter Jayson Blair fictionalized some of the paper's Lynch coverage).

The Lynch of this film has not been pumped up with steroids. She's a supply clerk gravely injured in a Humvee collision, not G.I. Jessica spraying bullets in a shootout. (She has only a sprinkling of lines in the entire movie, many of them in flashbacks to prewar West Virginia.) The American forces that rescue her encounter no "blaze of gunfire," as was described in an early Los Angeles Times account attributed to "defense officials and reports from the battlefield," but instead confront only compliant doctors and nurses. The White House is portrayed as being disproportionately focused on the urgency of this single mission, for no apparent purpose other than p.r. As for Iraq itself, it is presented as a shooting gallery whose citizens despise Saddam but can also be skeptical of their American liberators. Al-Rehaief's own wife tells him that he has been "poisoned" by all "those John Wayne movies."

What does it say that "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage on the war? It wasn't that long ago when correspondents on NBC's sibling network, MSNBC, were enthusing about President Bush's aircraft-carrier landing as "the president's excellent adventure." The movie even pays a dramatic price for its integrity; a reasonable approximation of the truth is less exciting than the bogus reports of Lynch-as-John Wayne. While its title character is still a hero, as she must be, the movie portrays Private Lynch as a lowly pawn of larger, mysterious forces operating in the shadows, whether in Baghdad or Washington.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/arts/09RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=