2006. Written and directed by Paul Greengrass.
After watching the excellent
Bloody Sunday on Friday, I continued my Greengrass Education weekend yesterday with
United 93, a film I had rather avoided when it was newly released. At that time, no one had preached me a Gospel of Greengrass, and I already felt plenty inundated with post-9/11 trauma bonding events. In fact, I was so angered by the way politicians kept manipulating people's unstoppably visceral reactions to their memories of 9/11 that I could not imagine wanting to see a movie in the same vein.
When I saw
Bloody Sunday, though, I think I knew and made peace with the type of film that Greengrass would direct with
United 93. It is in the moment, in the room. It doesn't tell the audience who these characters are by stuntcasting Nic Cage and swelling the music when something heroic or terrifying is going to happen. Rather,
United 93 persists in the ordinary, the mundane, the office bureaucracy of that morning.
There's something genius in the structure of this film, much of which focuses on what's happening with air traffic controllers, the FAA, and the military. Like us, the audience, those people knew something bad was happening but were helpless to act against it. They could track the horror, as we did when we watched the planes crash that morning on tv, but they had no real access to stop the situation. In contrast, when we are aboard United 93, we are with people who can act in that moment, and who do. And, through Greengrass's handheld camera technique, we don't feel as if we are watching these events play out, tracking it across the screen of the movie. Rather, we are on board. This film allows the audience to be the observer, the acted upon, and the actor, but never the sap.
I'm sure that almost every person who has seen this film already knew the story of United 93, had already imagined what they would say if they had to call their own family from the flight and tell them goodbye, had already cried plenty that week in September. But even though I knew and had already thought through these events, I still sobbed for the last half hour of the film. I mean, like, heaving sobs, not gentle tears. It's strange to know that that emotional reaction still exists inside of me, inside of many (if not most) of us, over eight years later. To push these ideas further, I had a similar reaction last week to an episode of
Mad Men (an episode I had already seen, at that). Spoilers for the 1960s, everyone: President Kennedy is assassinated. Now, I was born in 1983. My parents were only three years old when Kennedy was killed. However, I still cried for, like, five minutes during this episode, and they weren't really tears for the characters that I know and care about. It's weird, but I think I felt some echo of the national pain over the Kennedy assassination. Me, whose #3 life goal is to emigrate to Canada. So, I'm intrigued by the collective wound that
United 93 unveils. I think it would probably not take much to get someone crying over September 11th, but Greengrass does so in a respectful, respectable, responsible way.
Overall ranking: #99, between Bonnie and Clyde and Children of Men