Watching United 93

As I wrote back in April, I was deeply reluctant to go and see Paul Greengrass's United 93 in a movie theater. Just watching the trailer had been a nearly overwhelming emotional experience; I could barely stand the thought of sitting through a whole movie's worth, surrounded by strangers. It would be better, I thought, to do that privately, at home, once the DVD came out.

The DVD came out on Tuesday. The good people at Netflix zipped it right along to me, and I watched it last night. And I had just about the emotional reaction I'd expected to have. Except not quite...

Make no mistake: watching this movie is a harrowing experience. As I wrote before, Greengrass excels at immersive, you-are-there filmmaking, and he is a nearly perfect match to the material. After all, none of us can quite stop ourselves from queasily wondering what it must have felt like to be on that plane, and Greengrass answers this question for us, as closely as it can ever be answered. For the families of the victimes, of course, that "What must it have been like?" question was agonizing; so it was no surprise, then, that in the documentary about their reactions to the movie after a private screening, several of them remarked that it felt as if many of their questions had finally been answered.

Still, I have to wonder: is United 93 a work of art, or is it the cinematic equivalent of staring at a car wreck on the highway? In other words, is it enough to satisfy our morbid curiosity, or does a work of art need to reach higher in order to actually become art? (As Stephanie Zacharek noted in her Salon review in April, "...while 'United 93' offers a horrifyingly realistic evocation of pain and fear, it doesn't open itself out to any greater, more expansive truth.") On his DVD commentary (another advantage to waiting until the disk was released), Greengrass early on notes that one idea he wanted to bring out with this work was that two hijackings occurred on September 11th: one the hijacking of the planes that we all know about, but the other an attempt to hijack a religion, to try to hijack Islam itself, to say to the Muslim world "You must follow us and not your own conscience." That's a very interesting and useful thought; but I have to say, as a reasonably intelligent movie-watcher, I didn't pick up on that idea at all until listening to the commentary.

Maybe that's because the movie requires multiple viewings: the first time, you're so overwhelmed by the emotional whump of the story that you simply cannot think about it thematically. But if that's so, then the movie's emotional impact might actually work against it, because who on earth would want to watch this twice?

Now it may also be possible that some of the distance I felt had to do with the fact that, though Greengrass tried hard to cast unknown actors so as not to interfere with his audience's identification with the characters, I'm too much a student of actors for that to work. I recognized three of them right away, and as I mentioned before, I went to school with David Alan Basche, who played Todd Beamer. Having acted with David, and seen him in plays, and having caught most of his movie and TV work, it took off some of the edge when watching him in peril here. "David's doing a great job," I thought a couple times. But I don't think so--I know lots of actors, and I've never had any trouble responding appropriately to their work before. I might even argue that knowing David should have heightened my response to the movie: that seeing this guy I knew and liked in this most horrible of situations should have made me feel the story even more.

What I'm trying to get at here is a sense of subtle, but disquieting, disappointment. So much about the movie is so very good, and its emotional wallop is so undeniable, that it becomes that much worse to find that, having had a good sleep, I woke up and felt that nothing about the movie had lingered at all. It was almost as if I'd watched some Jerry Bruckheimer explosion-fest, something that made the time go by but meant nothing six hours later. That can't possibly be true with a movie as good as this one, can it?

Actually, a more apt comparison is with Apollo 13. The stories are nearly identical, up to a point: real-life events in which something goes very wrong, and the audience sees, intercut, the efforts of people on the ground and in the air (or not-air) to deal with the problem. The difference, of course, is that one story is uplifting--the heroic efforts succeed, and the crew are rescued--and the other story is not. The efforts on the ground fail, and despite a very valiant effort in the air, no one is saved. Being at heart optimistic, we naturally gravitate toward the happier ending, even if it does smack of wish fulfillment; but United 93 represents, unfortunately, what Greengrass flatly says it does in his commentary: the new reality. "We are all passengers on that plane now," he says (that's not a perfect quote, but close enough), "trying desperately to take back control of our own destiny."

Which, finally, answers my own question. The thing I had felt was missing from the movie, namely a point of view, an opinion about the story being told, is in fact there; but like I said above, as an audience we get so overwhelmed that you simply can't reach these sorts of conclusions upon first viewing. And believe me, it's essential that a filmmaker have an opinion about the story he's telling, even while trying to get the facts right for a story such as this. (The current furor over the mini-series "The Path to 9/11" represents the flip-side: a writer apparently indulged his point of view at the expense of the facts.) Greengrass was extraordinarily scrupulous in his fidelity to the facts, he exercised great care in refusing to sensationalize the violence, and he was smart not to try and over-explain the logistics or the jargon of the efforts on the ground; if he erred, it was in being just that little bit too scrupulous, too careful, too smart. His movie raises great questions, but it's so unsettling that I'm afraid most of them will slip past as we all cringe in our seats.