Discordant, Incomprehensible, and Lackluster American Mythology

Rating: 4/10 (29 April 2006)

I've never felt much of a connection with American history in the cinema. I've found U.S. history to be portrayed solely as disastrous moments like Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, Kennedy's assassination, or the Civil War. If not taking this approach then Hollywood wants to make history sexy, by playing out clichéd romances or revenge thriller narratives against the backdrop of historical moments. If it falls into the latter category, then a film about the Revolutionary War has to become about a family man with a mysterious past who has to confront his demons while protecting his family or exacting revenge for them like Mel Gibson in Roland Emmerich's film "The Patriot." Rarely, is American history portrayed without glamour, without commentary, without subtext. I can truly say that Paul Greengrass's "United 93" is such a film.
And it completely fails. Not that I like the type of movies mentioned previously. I loathe them, because I want a more personal view of our American history. "United 93" is admirably devoid of artifice and glamour. It does not turn these real people into characters with backstory and additional conflicts. It presents them as being extraordinarily ordinary, even dull. Greengrass presents a fairly real-time account of what happened to the passengers of this plane, without bringing in any outside context or historical hindsight. What makes the movie so unsettling is that the people in the film (I hesitate to use the word "characters" here)find out about the events of 9/11 in the same state of confusion that all Americans felt on that terrible morning. The people on flight 93 don't even know who's taken over their plane. The people in the air-traffic control tower don't know who's flown planes into the World Trade Center. In fact we see the utter failure of the government to react to the crisis in time. The greatest accuracy is assured in Greengrass's historical narrative by his exhaustive research of what really happened. The movie should be a resounding catharsis, a creative exploration of our great national wound, and yet it fails.
It fails because we have constantly heard this story since 9/11. Indeed, it is a heroic tale, and worthy of retelling. However, Greengrass tells this story the exact same way we have always heard it: as a series of events written down on a timetable, with people reduced to the roles of terrorists and heroes without any understanding of why these roles formed in the first place. It is history utterly without context, which for Greengrass was entirely the point. I admire that he didn't try to turn this film into an "Air Force One"-esquire battle in the sky between heroic Americans and evil terrorists. But it is unavoidable that the events of flight 93 have become the greatest American mythology of the 21st century: that Americans would have the tenacity to fight back against terror while facing certain death is awe-inspiring. The legend, however, has become greater than the reality, as the film clearly shows. Greengrass wanted to portray the mundane nature of life in contrast with the extraordinary events of the hijacking, but here he utterly failed. Whereas most of the passengers on the plane were concerned with their typical business and family problems, the terrorists are also portrayed as merely carrying out a job. We don't get any insight into what the terrorists are thinking as they are about to kill themselves and a plane-full of other people, nor do we see much of what the passengers are thinking in response to this. All the action takes place externally in this film, while the more interesting conflicts are the moral dilemmas the terrorists and passengers are facing internally. It is a very immersive movie, because the viewer truly feels like he or she is there, present on the plane, but somehow removed, detached, and unable to respond. Perhaps Greengrass was trying to instill this feeling of inaction, impotence, and detachment in the viewer so that he or she could feel what it must have been like to be on the flight, but I think that's giving him too much credit. The fact is: this is one of the most poorly shot films I've ever seen. Greengrass is clearly trying to convey a documentary-style realism here with his verite-inspired hand-held camera work. He is trying to create a sense of truth, of cinematic reality to complement the extensive historical research that went into the film. But the camera lurches and shakes so erratically, so completely without plan or design, that it is almost impossible to tell what is happening in key moments of the film, especially when the passengers decide to fight back. I rarely get motion sickness while watching a movie, but here nausea truly set in. This made it impossible to appreciate the flow of real-time events in the historical narrative.
I appreciate that Greengrass wanted to make a movie devoid of romanticism, but the fact is flight 93 has become an American mythology based on ordinary heroes and patriotic catch-phrases ("Let's Roll). It is impossible to do justice to the cultural conception of what happened on that plane. And as a result, the actors turn in mechanical performances designed to make them seem like real people. But in the end, despite being devoid of romantic labels, they are turned into roles. Here is the terrorist, here is the heroic passenger, here is the flight traffic controller, here is the military officer. So even though he doesn't turn these people into characters, he does reduce them to functional roles playing out their historical functions dispassionately, incapable of escaping their tragic destiny.