9/11 film opens painful chapter

9/11 film opens painful chapter: The families approved ‘United 93,’ but still the nation wonders: Are we ready to relive the tragedy?

As the passengers on the plane huddle in their seats and decide what to do, the ominous music builds to a climax. Following images of a plane about to hit the World Trade Center and of a hijacker who appears to be wearing a belt of explosives, words flash across the screen.

“On the day we faced fear,” the coming-attraction trailer says, “we also found courage.”

Less than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Hollywood is about to unveil its first attempt to make sense of–and make a profit from–the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history.

Although the movie, “United 93,” will not open until April 25, it has already provoked strong negative reactions in at least two instances.

A movie theater on New York’s Upper West Side pulled the trailer after complaints from audience members, including a woman who burst into tears. And at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, the trailer provoked audience cries of “Too soon!”

With other Sept. 11 movies to follow “United 93,” including an Oliver Stone film set in the rubble of the World Trade Center, questions of timing and purpose seem especially pressing.

Is it too soon for the movies to depict the defining event of a young century, a day on which nearly 3,000 people were killed? And what role do films that portray catastrophic historic events such as wars or assassinations play in a society’s group psyche?

Cockpit recorder played

“United 93″ tells the story of the 40 passengers and crew members aboard one of the four hijacked planes. From phone calls to family members on the ground, the plane’s occupants knew that three other planes had already been crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

With the hijacked plane heading to Washington, passengers apparently rushed the cockpit, and in the ensuing struggle, the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field. All aboard were killed.

The cockpit voice recording from the last 30 minutes of the flight, which family members have said includes the sounds of a struggle, is to be played in federal court at the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, whom a jury determined last week withheld information that could have prevented the attacks.

Universal Studios, which is distributing “United 93,” emphasizes in its prerelease publicity that British director Paul Greengrass received approval for making the $15 million film from every victim’s family.

“I don’t think you ever know when is the right time to make a film like this,” Greengrass, director of the thriller “The Bourne Supremacy” and “Bloody Sunday,” says in a “making of the movie” featurette being shown in some theaters in place of the trailer. “And that’s why you have to start by asking the families. They clearly feel that it’s the right time.”

Gordon Felt, whose brother Edward was a passenger on the plane, was impressed by the filmmakers’ dedication to an accurate rendering of the day’s events, down to asking whether his brother would have been drinking coffee or tea on his way to the airport.

“I don’t think it’s too soon,” Felt said. “It’s never too soon to remember the horrible crime that was committed against our country. We need to remember and not let our guard down. And we need to memorialize some extremely brave citizens who decided on this morning to fight back and said, ‘We’re not going to let you dictate the terms on which we end our lives.’”

Other Sept. 11 families have generally been supportive as well.

Bill Doyle, whose son Joseph died at the trade center and who stays in touch with a wide swath of the 9/11 community, said he has heard only a few complaints from family members who were caught off guard by the trailer, which includes real video of the second plane about to strike the south tower of the trade center.

But such images also have been back in the news because of the Moussaoui trial, he noted.

“I think the 9/11 families are so used to seeing those planes hit the buildings,” Doyle said. “I don’t think the objections are so much from the 9/11 families as from those who didn’t suffer a loss.”

Comments on Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog were about evenly split regarding “United 93.” Several echoed Felt’s positive comments, while others expressed reservations about a movie that could make money from a national tragedy.

“The trailer was really disturbing and made me uncomfortable,” commented “ScriptGrrl,” who apparently watched a streaming version of the trailer at the movie’s Web site, www.united93movie.com. “I had to look away three times during the stream. I can’t imagine sitting through two hours of that and probably won’t go to see the film.”

Universal has said that the trailer will be shown only before R-rated or “grown-up” PG-13 movies. Last week, the movie received an R rating for language and “some intense sequences of terror and violence.”

“United 93″ will open this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which was started in 2002 by actor Robert De Niro and others as a way to revitalize lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks.

The movie opens nationwide April 28, with Universal donating 10 percent of the first weekend’s box office receipts toward the construction of the Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania.

Although “United 93″ will be Hollywood’s first Sept. 11 story, other art forms and media have already dealt with the terrorist attack. Television shows such as “Third Watch” and “The West Wing” touched either directly or obliquely on the attack in fall 2001, and Bruce Springsteen released his 9/11 album “The Rising” in summer 2002.

In January, the Arts and Entertainment cable network aired a TV movie about Flight 93, attracting 5.9 million viewers, the channel’s highest-rated show.

And the New York Philharmonic orchestra performed the debut of composer John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” during the first-anniversary observances in 2002.

Sept. 11 has also figured in novels as varied as the cyberspace thriller “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson and the contemporary love story “The Good Life” by Jay McInerney.

Culture experts surprised

If anything, several film and popular culture experts said, it’s surprising that Hollywood has waited this long.

“Coming Home” and “Apocalypse Now,” two of the first big post-Vietnam War movies, came out within four years of the North Vietnamese victory in 1975.

Those movies “were articulating issues that were very fresh,” said screenwriter Ted Braun, who teaches at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television.

And the pace of contemporary culture has accelerated since then.

“For some people, it’s never going to be time for this event to be the subject of a movie,” said Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, a specialist in popular culture. “But that doesn’t mean, I think, that we as a culture reduce ourselves to silence about it.”

Movies about painful chapters in American life “help people empathize and open up a dialogue on things that are deeply felt, but also deeply covered,” said Yale University sociologist Ronald Eyerman. “Crying may be necessary, anger as well.”

That’s because historical accounts of such events as Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust or Sept. 11 may provide the facts, but film puts faces on those calamities.

“By bringing us into the feelings and most importantly the actions of these characters, it’s allowing us to understand what happened,” Braun said. “It can articulate or make sense of an historical experience and do it through the emotions.”

soswanson@tribune.com
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/04/09/1554714.htm