From the very beginning, I was completely enthralled by the story of the valiant passengers and crew of United flight 93. It seemed like the stuff of legend – or Hollywood , but it was entirely real, entirely true. Something incredible occurred aboard that plane- although from the very beginning, it was clear that it was impossible to know exactly what. Oddly enough, that “unknowable” quality of this story was made clearer for me the moment I set eyes on the cover of a book titled Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 & the Passengers & Crew Who Fought Back. (I interviewed the author on my radio program.) Adorning the cover was a photograph of a commercial jet in flight at a very high altitude – so high, in fact, that it almost cannot be seen against the backdrop of the sky.
I think this photograph (eerily similar to the photo on the cover of the DVD) perfectly encapsulates how the specific narrative of this story remains maddeningly out of our reach. Yes, there is much we can surmise from all of the phone calls made by passengers and crew members from the plane- and from the audio cockpit recording that was played for family members. But still, it is impossible to know precisely what happened on the plane because every one of the participants and witnesses perished in the plane crash. We are left with what we know – which is not nearly as much as we might want to know – and for the rest, we must draw upon our imagination.
It’s for this reason that I think most people were both excited and wary at the prospect of this powerful and inspiring story being transformed into a major film. Hollywood has a maddening way of taking a touching real-life drama and amping it up into something almost grotesque and unrecognizable – or draining it of all of its humanity and authenticity, leaving us with something sounding tinny and commercial rather than vibrant and real. In the hands of a director like James Cameron, we might have ended up with a film that was a bloated exercise in exaggeration. We are all fortunate that this film was done by as caring and sensitive a director as Paul Greengrass, who chose to tell the story with unvarnished realism yet restraint – an exceptionally tricky balancing act.
One of the most intriguing choices that he made was in the framework within which the story of United 93 was told. Instead of focusing entirely on the events that unfolded on that plane, we are also taken into the heart of FAA headquarters, NORAD headquarters, and two different air traffic control towers as the normalcy of the day descended into utter chaos. By and large, we see highly skilled professionals dispatching their duties to the best of their abilities; the trouble comes when the scope of the crisis (and its unprecedented nature) overwhelm standard operating procedures. The film also depicts in unescapable fashion how communication breakdowns in almost every direction made an already terrible situation even worse. In other words, the film is not an indictment of individual negligence or incompetence – far from it – but rather an indictment of systemic shortcomings that were cruelly exposed in the day’s mayhem. At any rate, it was a brilliant if unexpected choice for a film about United 93 to spend so much of its time and attention in these earthbound arenas. A lesser director would have missed the enormous dramatic potential of such scenes, which are every bit as riveting as anything that takes place on the plane. (In a rather daring move, some of the principle roles in these scenes are played by the actual men and women – in effect portraying themselves.)
In another daring choice, the film opens with the sound (and eventually the sight) of one of the terrorists reciting his morning prayers in the quiet and serenity of his hotel room; it both humanizes the terrorists and also clarifies what motivated them to act as they did. A more standard Hollywood treatment would have portrayed them as mad monsters; I applaud Greengrass for recognizing that one can treat them as human beings without condoning their horrific deeds for one moment or engendering our sympathy.
The heart and soul of the film, of course, rests with the passengers and crew, with whom we can so deeply relate even as we come to revere them for their courage and ingenuity in the face of almost certain doom. There is scarcely a single recognizable face among them (the best known among the actors is Cheyenne Jackson, who earned recent accolades on Broadway but who was all-but-unknown at the time this film was made) but they deliver spot-on performances. The writing is spare with scarcely a trace of artifice; what unfolds on that plane feels completely true – including the confusion and fear that eventually gives way to fierce resolve and the desperate attack on the hijackers that very nearly succeeds in saving them. Of course, we all know that the story ends with the plane crashing- but in a field in rural Pennsylvania rather than the U. S. Capitol in Washington D.C., meaning that the passengers may not have saved themselves but they almost certainly saved the lives of people on the ground.
This film received almost universally positive reviews when it was released in 2006 – and with very good reason. It is a stunning cinematic achievement. One of the only serious reservations raised about the film is that we see, at the peak of the battle, two of the hijackers killed at the hands of passengers. It is hard not to derive at least some measure of satisfaction from such a sight, but the fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the hijackers were killed during the course of the incident. Are these two killings in the film simply for our own pleasure? Perhaps. What kind of film would this have been without these two killings? It may have been a slightly more truthful film, but it may ahve also been a less moving and uplifting one.
One of the most extraordinary achievements of Greengrass and his colleagues is that they have managed to craft a film that has us on the edge of our seats, even though we all know how the story ends. What gives the film such searing tension is not any sense of uncertainty – but rather the sense that we are on that plane with Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and all of the others, somehow sharing in their anguish as well as their glory. And as we watch one passenger after another placing phone calls to loved ones to say one last “I love you,” we realize that what makes this film so powerful and haunting is that it is filled with real people not so different from us – people with whom we can powerfully identify, even though in almost every instance we do not even know their names. And yet we know who they are – and the high ideals they have come to represent.
