By Matt Zoller Seitz
Originally published in NYPress, April 26-May 2.
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The plane is going down. The engines are buckling and whining. Passengers are screaming. The ground is rushing up.
I’m describing the events of United Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, the one driven into the ground in Shanksville, Pa., after its passengers fought back against their terrorist captors. I’m also describing "United 93," the blockbuster docudrama based on that incident which enters wide release this Friday.
If you read that opening depiction again, it sounds like an account of another thrilling experience altogether—a theme park ride. Unfortunately, it’s this last experience that "United 93" most resembles—but not because of any one misstep made by director Paul Greengrass or his cast.
The unofficial graffiti tag of 9/11 was “We Will Never Forget,” yet this film, which is dedicated to the memory of all who died, is ironically designed to make you erase everything but the 100 most emotionally intense minutes of 9/11. Given all this, it seems no surprise that Greengrass’ last film, "The Bourne Supremacy," was a blockbuster action sequel about a government-trained killer with amnesia. This new movie is a different kind of amnesiac agent: It’s propaganda produced by, and for, the malleable center of the American psyche, a place where political leanings are built from Tinker Toys.
The film’s tone, which ranges from somber to harrowing, never strays outside the emotional bandwidth of a memorial service. There’s not any single egregious creative misstep, but all these factors combine together to form some wild rollercoaster experience of the psyche. 
The film’s triumphs are wholly visceral, and so is its PR campaign. At a press screening last week, it reduced a roomful of hardened critics to tears. Some of them went straight to their offices afterward and filed rave reviews, and I can’t say I blame them. Writing about the movie so soon after watching it must have been the critics’ equivalent of having to fill out an accident report after being pulled from a wreck. You can’t really say anything except, “That was intense,” and, “I’m glad it’s over”—the same things you would say as you’re stumbling into the crowd after the most hellish amusement park attraction of all-time. Of course it’s intense: It squeezes your heart in its fist, awakens your sense-memories of 9/11 and your dark imaginings of United Flight 93’s last moments while sending you home without a scratch.
Anyone who denies its power is lying. But anyone who justifies that power on aesthetic grounds is perpetrating a greater lie.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
The 9/11 show
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4 comments:
Wow, Matt. I couldn't disagree with you more, pal.
And yes, I am one of those critics you mention who went home after the movie with tears in his eyes and filed a rave.
I don't have much time right now, but in short: 9/11 has already been so exploited and enbalmed in both ideology and flag-waving sentiment, I think this movie's greatest triumph is to bring us back to the sickened helplessness of that Tuesday morning -- an unfathomable horror that seems to erupt from somewhere totally out of context.
As a movie experience it's grueling as hell and at times almost unwatchable, but ten or twenty years down the road when my kids ask me what it was like to live in America that morning, I'll at least have something to point to.
The events of September eleventh have already been perverted into everything from a justification for war to an easy way for firemen to get laid (as seen on the earlier, better episodes of RESCUE ME).
I felt like Greengrass' narrow focus reminds us of something that we tend to forget when we're all busy making sweeping pronouncements about "a post 9/11 world" -- and that's that this was a day when a lot of ordinary, regular people got up to go to work and were horribly fucking murdered.
Not my idea of a fun Friday night at the movies, but I hardly think it's perpetrating a lie.
Bravo, Matt, well done -- a first-rate piece of film criticism. I especially savored this observation, "Writing about the movie so soon after watching it must have been the critics’ equivalent of having to fill out an accident report after being pulled from a wreck."
The tear-stained testimonial of Mr. Burns notwithstanding, I am awfully glad that I didn't have to sit through such crap.
SB: but ten or twenty years down the road when my kids ask me what it was like to live in America that morning, I'll at least have something to point to.
If, God forbid, I wind up with children, my first person account of 9/11, and how they almost didn't have a Daddy to make them, should suffice a lot better than this year's Passion of the Christ style guilt trip designed to separate me from $12.
I cannot speak for the movie, as I have not seen it. But I have been bombarded with commercials EVERY SINGLE TIME the NBA playoff games had a time out. Whenever I'm on Yahoo or IMDB, I get the ad. This proliferation seems so tasteless, and the trailer that the Lincoln Square theater pulled (but not before I saw it) played like an action movie, not a tragedy. The entire marketing campaign of this movie is whorish as hell.
And I love the "Universal will donate 10% of the film's grosses to charity!" Cheap fuckers. Well, I think I'll donate my ticket price myself--all 100% will go where I put it. Cheap fuckers.
There's no way in Hell I'm seeing this movie.
And I love the "Universal will donate 10% of the film's grosses to charity!" Cheap fuckers. Well, I think I'll donate my ticket price myself--all 100% will go where I put it. Cheap fuckers.
There's no way in Hell I'm seeing this movie.
I agree 100% and couldn't say it any better.
Nicanor
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