No matter the faux-documentary style or the real-time plot progression or the use of nonprofessional and unknown actors so as not to break the illusion, United 93 failed to really affect me. But that certainly wasn't for lack of trying. Director Paul Greengrass and Co. pull out all the stops on this one but by the time the fifteenth passenger is calling home to say good-bye I was starting to wonder what the Capitol might have looked like had the passengers failed to seize control of the plane and it had made it to Washington. Does that mean I'm a cynical bastard too inured to the mass mediated horrors that humans inflict on each other? Maybe. Does it mean that I've watched films with one eye on the action and one on how it was done for so long that I'm incapable of having a real emotional response to a film? God, I hope not. Actually, no, I know that isn't true. There are films, some of them nonfiction but an equal number of them are fiction, in which the moments of violence and horror have really hit home, have knocked that part of my brain thinking about how it was done completely out of my conscious thoughts (the two examples that jump most immediately to mind are the death of John Rooney in Road to Perdition and the Arab man's suicide in Cache). So even after all this time and all those films, the medium still has the power to bowl me over. But even with the loaded images from September 11, 2001, United 93 failed to do that. Why?
I suspect the answer is twofold. Firstly, Greengrass tries so damn hard to get me to emote that I almost don't want to just to spite him. This is especially true in the film's last act which, maybe not incidentally, is also the only part of the film that is almost entirely conjecture on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, during the first half of the film, right up until the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I was a bit caught up in it all. But after that the film never leaves the doomed plane and its passengers who make those seventeen phone calls to loved ones wherein the passengers say tearful goodbyes (which is initially compelling but soon turns into a game of seeing how long it takes the person in question to say they love whoever's on the other end of the phone) and people start to pray (both the passengers and the terrorists). I could maybe forgive the many many goodbyes but this whole, "we're all human beings" nonsense is exactly the type of shit conservatives have every right to hate liberals for. Yes, we're all human beings with our own unique hopes and fears and dreams and even gods. This is so head-slappingly obvious that to have it pointed out moments before what is this generation's most powerful shared experience is unnecessary, annoying and, most devastatingly for the film in question, distracting. They lost me right there. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so wondering what the conversations must have been like when the filmmakers were trying to decide how exactly to end the film. I bet they were spirited and possibly more interesting than the stuff that ended up on the screen (although the fact that the outcome is know in advance might have something to do with my distraction here).
But back to the point above. The second reason this film failed to really connect with me emotionally is because of the way in which it was shot. At this early stage in our recovery from 9/11, I'm not sure there was any other way to make this film than in the pseudo-documentary style that Greengrass employs. Anything stylized or art-directed would probably (maybe rightfully) be derided as too glossy for an event that still touches a raw nerve for a great number of people. Plus, the faux cinema verite style goes a long way towards allowing the average viewer to completely believe in the events on the screen. I say "average viewer" but I'm really just guessing. It didn't have that effect on me so I'm making that assumption based on reviews I've seen in the papers and magazines.
As far as I'm concerned, the fake documentary style of this film made me very aware that I was watching a film, more so even than were I watching a very artificial looking big budget version of the same events. The art of film has, over the last century, developed a grammar and language uniquely its own that, when properly deployed, becomes basically invisible, absorbing the viewer into the action on the screen. Documentaries, by their very nature, cannot employ all the tools (angles, lighting, etc.) that fiction filmmakers can and thus are less able to so absorb the viewer. Why then would a filmmaker attempting to be as "realistic" and as "truthful to the events" as possible want to give up more than half the available filmmaking tools? It's like Greengrass is trying so hard to make it seem real that he's overcompensating and thus it feels fake. On-screen violence, to my eyes, is only shocking and horrible when it is abundantly (and horribly) clear exactly what is going on. When the action on-screen is obscured by shaking cameras and whooshing zooms, that says, "Movie!" to me. It doesnt say, "this is a real thing that we just happened to catch on film." No style can say that. But at least when the terrible acts are shown clearly there's no place to hide. Even though the viewers know they are seeing a prosthetic or a computer generated effect, their eyes deceive them for a moment. And in that moment of deception lies the true horror (for me anyway, I know this is all subjective).
I knew going in that I wasn't going to get that in United 93. And if Greengrass had employed that method I think the critical establishment would have bolted from rather than embraced this film. I think this film will be a cathartic and momentous experience for a lot of Americans. I think, in some ways, this film will make the events of September 11, 2001, more real for people who spent that whole morning glued to their televisions but had nothing to personally connect them to the events they were witnessing. Because the real images we have from that day are so grainy and poorly photographed (so un-movie like) it might take a fictionalized version to really bring it home. And if that's what happens and it can be cathartic for people, then I guess that's something. For me, watching television that morning, I kept thinking not that this was like a movie (which was something I later heard that many people thought) but that this was less affecting than a movie. Even though it was undoubtedly really happening, because it was shot so poorly and because the news anchors were so unprepared that they lacked the ability to convey the import of this event, I kept thinking that I should feel something, anything much stronger than I was. And, I kept thinking, if this were a big budget Hollywood film, they'd have shot it in such a way as to facilitate my outpouring of emotion. But these grainy shaky images were preventing that.
The same exact thing was happening when I was watching United 93. I couldn't react to it as emotionally as I think I (maybe) should have because of the way it was shot. So, in that respect, Greengrass and Co. have made a film that reflects my experience of that day pretty damn accurately. And if that's true for me, it's probably true for most other Americans. And as such I guess we could have done a lot worse for Hollywood's first crack at depicting our greatest national calamity in fifty years.
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