The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001 generated a variety of responses beyond
the predictable search for answers and explanations, including such amazingly
un-American activities as preemptive invasion of another country, suspension of
civil liberties, illegal surveillance of citizens,
secret prisons, and officially sanctioned torture. But until now, oddly, it has
inspired little in the way of art. Although some controversy surrounds the
release of United 93, the first Hollywood
motion picture to deal with that infamous day, because of the short passage of
time since then, popular culture usually reacts much more quickly to
extraordinary events, which suggests that American filmmakers actually
exercised some rare patience and restraint.
The movie itself demonstrates some surprising qualities of
maturity and balance, a measure of objectivity generally missing from most
public reactions to the terrorism of 9/11. In telling the story of that fateful
morning, the writer and director, Paul Greengrass,
concentrates on the one airplane that failed to reach its target — presumably
the Capitol — but, as a result of the actions of its passengers, crashed into
a field in Pennsylvania. Without
sensationalism or sentimentality, his picture provides a remarkably credible
and utterly compelling version of the events.
To create the appearance of real action in real time, the
movie employs a kind of cinema verité representation of a story involving many people
in many places. Using innumerable quick cuts and rapid changes of scene, the
picture weaves together scores of strands of character and action, jumping
around in a variety of locations on the ground as well as inside the airplane itself. Because of the large number of people in all those
locations, no particular person emerges as anything remotely resembling a star
or a lead, and no recognizable actors play the parts.
The picture begins its characteristic movement with shots of
the terrorists praying and preparing for their final journey on United Airlines
Flight 93. It also shows parallel sequences of the airplane’s crew readying the
craft, passengers lining up and boarding, all the minutiae of contemporary air
travel. The hand-held camera almost never fixes on one particular person,
rarely shows a long or even a medium shot, but confines itself mostly to tight
close-ups, as if it were simply part of the crowd on board, essentially putting
the viewer on the airplane as well.
In addition to its movement among the passengers, the point
of view shifts frequently to numerous locations on the ground, all of them
connected to one region or another of air traffic control, both civilian and
military. An alert controller hears some garbled foreign language before the
transponder of one of the World Trade Center planes shuts off, others lose
communication with the two other hijacked planes, and nobody initially can
quite figure out the problem. An impotent military begs for orders from
somebody, but nobody can locate the president or the vice president. By the
time the people on the ground realize the truth, of course, it is too late to
do anything except mourn.
In the air, the movie tracks the progress of the terrorists’
takeover of United 93, building suspense through the most ordinary acts — the
innocent victims, unaware of the threat, chat, read, nap, and eat their
breakfast, while the hijackers plot their destruction. Despite the audience’s
knowledge of the story and its outcome, the sequences maintain a high level of
tension and create several moments of action that, despite their familiarity, still
shock and disturb.
The concentration on the mundane details of the trip, the
technical procedures of the air traffic controllers, the brief, incomplete
conversations, the rapid cuts from individual to individual add to the
pervasive sense of a normality about to be disrupted, a familiar fabric of the
everyday about to be violently torn apart, a random assortment of ordinary
people about to encounter a terrible fate. Avoiding distortion and melodrama,
the director refuses to turn those passengers into the heroes embraced and
exploited by politicians and the media, but simply allows his cameras and his
microphones to capture their compelling and moving human reality. United 93 touches on the real tragedy of
September 11, 2001 in a
paradoxically intense and remarkably unspectacular manner, and thus attains the
triumph of truth.
United 93 (R), directed by Paul Greengrass,
is playing at Culver Ridge 16, Henrietta 18, Webster 12, Tinseltown, Greece
Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.
