Taut formula film succeeds sans jingoism.
United 93 may be the most difficult film you ever sit through. Please do anyway. It's not just that writer and director Paul Greengrass (
Bloody Sunday
,
The Bourne Supremacy
) has the disaster-movie formula
nailed
. Nor the blithely quotidian morning routines of the flight crew, passengers and air traffic control staff, whose innocence we
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watch with a nauseating sense of dread. Nor is it the way Greengrass lets events unfold exactly as bewilderingly as they did on 9.11. And it's not even his meticulous accuracy, a commitment to detail that preserves what little we
do
know about what transpired, and adds to or modifies it sparingly, with delicacy and tact. No; while there's little doubt that
United 93
falls squarely in the category of great filmmaking, it also performs an unprecedented historical service: that of wresting at least one of the events of 9.11 out of the mouths of politicians and placing it squarely back in human reality-messy, distorted, confused, terrified and, yes, heroic-right where it belongs.
It's no small achievement to render an historical event as simultaneously inescapable and also somehow fragile, contingent upon the choices and actions of the people involved. Greengrass has done this with a series of dazzlingly smart moves. The film takes place in real time, from the opening scenes, to the desperate passengers' attempted retaking of the plane, ending in the United flight's final, inevitable descent. The pace is excruciating.
Greengrass' next stroke of
brilliance was to cast unknown actors. He gave his cast copious background information on their characters and turned them loose. The effect is stunningly naturalistic, a sliver of the mundane in every frame. The actors are utterly swallowed up by their characters; and many of those on the ground are
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played by themselves. These non-actors blend in seamlessly, injecting the film with almost unendurable verisimilitude.
Finally,
United 93
succeeds so well because it refuses to take the easy way out by demonizing the terrorists. One of the more affecting moments comes when, just before boarding, a hijacker speaks into his cellphone, in quiet German: "I love you…I love you, I love you," echoing the words his victims are soon to utter into
their
cellphones and onto answering machines. As the film draws to its grim end, both passengers and terrorists pray aloud, they (and we) are united, however fleetingly, in human desperation. If you can stomach it,
United 93
will haunt you for a long, long time.
