United 93

Paul Greengrass's film United 93 will premiere at Tribeca next Tuesday, then open nationwide three days later. I have several excellent reasons for wanting to see the movie: first, a friend of mine from college, David Basche, is playing Todd Beamer, which is potentially a career-making role for him. (He played my doppelganger in an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Shadow. So naturally, I taught him everything he knows. Yep. You bet.)

The second reason is that I really like director Paul Greengrass. Bourne Supremacy was terrific, and his docudrama Bloody Sunday, about The Troubles, was absolutely wonderful. He has a very potent, you-are-there style that makes for visceral, immersive movies, and I think he was a great choice for this movie.

But maybe too great. And maybe his style is exactly the problem. Think of that scene in Bourne Supremacy when Jason Bourne is in his car and gets broadsided, spins out, recovers and gets away. The quick cutting, from hand on stick to foot on pedal to tight on his face as his attention never wavers, really makes you feel like you're in that car with him, experiencing what he experiences. Greengrass is great at this stuff. But this is Flight 93 we're talking about.

There have been a bunch of articles lately, wondering whether the public is ready for this movie (including a good article that Yahoo pulled from The Hollywood Reporter), and it's a question I can't answer. Certainly I can't speak for anyone else, or guess what "the public" may or may not be ready for; but I have seen the trailer on Apple's QuickTime site, it's about three minutes long and it is a very emotional experience. Am I ready for a ninety-minute movie of this stuff? In public, with a theater full of strangers? That, for me, is exactly the question, and it may be the question a lot of people are quietly asking themselves. Do I want to go into a theater and sit there and be overcome by this experience? Or do I want to just wait till it comes out on DVD and experience it privately, at home? My guess is that most people will opt for the latter: that the movie won't do so well at the box office, but that the DVD release will go through the roof.

Then again, who knows? I vividly remember going to see Dead Man Walking in a theater, and at exactly the moment when the curtains in the death chamber are pulled open, some woman in the back of the theater let out one strangled sob, then choked it all back. It was a powerful reminder of the potency of a communal experience, of the fact that an audience is comprised of people who carry their own stories into the room with them, experiences that can sometimes react with the story onscreen in surprising and compelling ways. My own memory of the movie is now intertwined with that woman's reaction to it: did she have a relative who was on Death Row somewhere? Had someone she known been murdered? I'll never know, but it made the movie itself less abstract. The same thing can happen with United 93, and there's a real value to that kind of experience.

So maybe I'll suck it up and risk my manliness and go see the movie in a theater. Maybe; still haven't decided. The question is how many others will do the same? I guess we'll know in a week.

And, on an unrelated note: there is an excellent, thought-provoking article on the immigration debate in Salon, noting how it challenges progressive thinking but ultimately may provide a solution to the labor movement's slow decline. Definitely worth reading.