untitled
UNITED 93
"On United 93
& the Problem of Inspired Films"
Directed by: Paul
Greengrass
Internet Movie
Database Entry for full details
2006.
When United
93 was released it was, along with the subsequent World Trade Center,
seen, as Frank Rich noted, as a referendum on whether or not America
was prepared for “9-11 The Movie”. The
problem for me, from a film critic’s standpoint, is why the
general public or the media would feel that the events of September
11th necessitate a cinematic interpretation? The question is
not whether it’s “too soon” to make a
movie but why a movie should ever be made in the first place.
American films based on actual events and/or persons, living or dead,
have always possessed a conspicuous flaw: they feel fake, because the standard Hollywood
narrative form is inherently artificial. All Hollywood movies
are basically identical in terms of their storytelling style; of course
there is wiggle-room for variations in complexity, but on a basic level
they all follow the same framework, the three-act structure of set-up,
conflict, and denouement. When attempting, however, to tell
inspired stories (as opposed to invented stories) within this
inhibiting structure, the intricacies of the original story are
inevitably lost. Real-life people and situations are
irreproducibly complex; condensing them into standard Hollywood forms
yields invariably awkward results. (This explains why
Made-for-TV movies are often so laughable, because they need to explain
months of subtle change in one or two histrionic scenes.)
Consider Ray
(2004), the overrated Oscar-magnet. Obviously Ray Charles had
some serious psychological problems that drove him to womanizing and
drug-addiction; the film, however, reduces his motivations to his guilt
over the death of his younger brother. Once he confronts this
guilt, in a ridiculous dream-sequence near the end of the film, he is
cured -- if only real-life were so simple!
The most successful biopic I’ve ever seen in the Hollywood
style is Amadeus
(1984). The filmmakers do not set out to tell Mozart’s life
story so much as they use Mozart’s story to touch on larger
themes like the nature of artistic genius. As a result it is
largely historically inaccurate but it doesn’t really matter,
particularly since there are a few centuries of distance between the
film and its source of inspiration. It is not an historical film.
There are more contemporary films as well that successfully handle inspired
stories, like those of Gus van Sant. His film Elephant (2003)
deals with an event “ripped-from-the-headlines”
(give or take a few years), a Columbine-esque
school-shooting. First of all, van Sant is careful not to
bind his characters to real-life individuals; they are inspired by real
people, but do not come with the baggage of verisimilitudinous
expectations. The Dylan Klebold stand-in won’t be
judged by how much he resembles Dylan Klebold because, after all, he is
not actually supposed to be Dylan Klebold.
More importantly, though, van Sant does not attempt to fit his subjects
neatly into the classical Hollywood narrative style; rather, he alters
and deconstructs that form in the attempt to accommodate the
irresolvable complexities of his subjects. His narrative
style is fractured, going back and forth through time, often forcing
the audience to re-experience the same diegetic moments from alternate
perspectives. There is little traditional plot to speak of,
and the film is packed with long tracking shots of students roaming the
school’s corridors without any real action. There
are no causes, only effects, and the results are powerfully effective.
United 93,
on the other hand, hits the video store shelves with full-fledged
adherence to the classical Hollywood
guidelines. Soon into it I felt like I was watching The Bridge on the River Kwai,
waiting two and a half interminable hours for that damn bridge to explode.
Thankfully, United 93
is a bit shorter. The first hour is populated mostly by
military personnel and air traffic controllers watching the events of
September 11th unfold on various monitors and screens (just like most
of us did!); it is outright boring, but it sets up the drama.
The last third of the film, which mostly takes place on the ill-fated
flight, is particularly unsuspenseful, leaving the viewer to just wait
for the plane to crash; this, however, leaves the viewer feeling guilty
and confused. We know, in the back of our minds, that
these are real people and we shouldn’t want to see them die.
The characters, however, are poorly developed and lack any more depth
than the stock characters populating any generic slasher
film. The hijackers are mad Islamic fundamentalists, plain
and simple; the passengers are heroes, motivated by patriotism and good
ol’ American courage. The film comes dangerously
close to apotheosizing, and is at best jingoistic propaganda.
As David Thomson wrote, “This is a picture about American
courage and enterprise…[i]t is a rousing affirmation of a
war effort.” The New Yorker called the film
“brilliant”, but a modicum of taste and restraint
(because, admittedly, the film could hypothetically have been much more
vulgar) does not a brilliant film make. Good art has the
power to move us in virtue of its complexities and the manner in which
it works through them. United
93 does not set out to explore or to clarify, only to
glorify.
The film possesses no emotional core of its own; rather than aiding the
audience in working through their own engrained emotions it merely
exploits them. Only those easily manipulated by the usual
modes of Hollywood filmmaking should find the film in any way
emotionally cathartic. The rest of us are left thinking, what
the hell was the point then?
There are only two reasons to produce films, or art in general: to
entertain, and/or to enlighten. Only the repulsively morbid could
find United 93 entertaining,
and for the reasons stated above the film is not enlightening in the
slightest. It seems, then, that the only reason the film was made
was to expolit the deaths that resulted from the terrorist attacks for
personal profit. That feels, to me, as morally repugnant as war
profiteering.
Gus van Sant should have been hired to direct United 93 (or at
least one the many similar made-for-cable variations) so he
could’ve done for its passengers, and hijackers, what he did
for the high school students of Elephant;
that is, to make them into (seemingly) real human beings. It
would be truly cathartic to see some ordinary, unadulterated humanity
injected into the already cool and heavily mediated images of the death
and destruction on September 11, 2001. -- Henry Stewart
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