 |
|
Facing
the unthinkable: United 93.
|
Infamy
Revisited
By
Shawn Stone
United
93
Directed
by Paul Greengrass
To
answer the obvious question, United 93 was worth making,
and is worth seeing. It was worth making because we shouldn’t
forget the senseless deaths that day, or the shattering force
of the hatred that some very determined people have for the
United States. It’s worth seeing because it’s a story well-told,
with writer-director Paul Greengrass bringing the confusion
and terror of 9/11 to vivid life.
It’s not voyeuristic or bombastic, however, and in that lies
its strength. We know how 9/11 will end, but the film does
not wallow in either portent or histrionics. Just the opposite:
By never letting us know what time it is, we’re as in the
dark as to where we are in the narrative as the people in
the film.
Not surprisingly, United 93 is frightening on multiple
levels. Who can remember the innocence of a time when hijackings
were so rare that pilots, flight controllers and FAA officials
alike would react to the first reports that morning with utter
disbelief? Before every errant blip on a radar screen was
a possible terrorist attack? As one terrible thing after another
happens, the real drama is in watching the full horror dawn
on the participants.
Most immediately scary, however, is the way Greengrass dramatizes
the communications failures on 9/11. The executives at the
FAA National Center in Virginia understand what’s going on,
and the military command at the Northeast Air Defense Center
just down the Thruway in Rome react with clarity and intelligence
(to bad information). There’s just no communication between
the two—neither the FAA bureaucracy nor the military bureaucracy
are capable of communicating with the other. Long after the
FAA brass figure out that American Airlines flight 11 was
the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, the FAA bureaucrats
tell the Air Force that flight 11 is still in the air, headed
toward Washington, D.C. Given the Homeland Security department
failures with Katrina, it’s difficult to have any faith that
other government agencies—like, say, the FAA—have been doing
any better in the last six years.
As has been widely reported, the film has no stars. It couldn’t,
or they might as well have titled it Airport 2001.
It does, however, have plenty of actors who have guest-starred
on TV shows like Boston Legal and CSI; a cast
resume check turned up 18 names who have appeared on one (or
more) of the Law & Order programs. These vaguely
familiar faces create a feeling not unlike déjà vu, as we
feel like we’ve seen these people before, maybe on the street,
maybe . . . on a plane.
Greengrass does an excellent job putting the story together,
but his familiar limitations as a director show, too. While
his addiction to shaky handheld shots (which sank The Bourne
Supremacy) are appropriate here, he still has problems
creating convincing action sequences. Also, he doesn’t show
any feeling for the geography of the plane’s interior; I was
confused about where the action was taking place, and what
happened to many of the passengers he showed before the hijacking.
These are small complaints, however. The filmmaker’s masterful
use of pace keeps us off-balance; when United 93 reaches
its preordained end, it’s still a shock. And despite the questionable
conjecture that the passengers managed to kill a couple of
hijackers—acts that are dismayingly satisfying—the film offers
no “closure.” Which is just as it should be.
Private-Eye
High
Brick
Directed
by Rian Johnson
I’m tempted to call Brick the post-Columbine Heathers.
It shares with that movie the premise that high school is
a microcosm of all adult vice and viciousness. But where the
earlier film played it for laughs, albeit darkly, Brick
is treacherous and mean—and all the more satisfying for
it. In Heathers, the histrionics of the characters
were extrapolations and obvious exaggerations of adolescent
angst and self-seriousness. The viewer couldn’t— wasn’t intended
to—take any of it seriously. Despite its reliance on a distinct
gimmick, Brick isn’t goofy, and the viciousness of
its characters is chilling.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (whom TV viewers will recognize as the
kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun) plays Brendan, a high-school
loner investigating the murder of an ex-girlfriend. Shortly
before her death, the girlfriend contacts Brendan and, in
argot mysterious even to him, indicates that she has “screwed
up real bad” and is in trouble with “the Pin.” Something has
gone wrong with the “brick,” there’s a problem with “Tug.”
It’s all obscure to Brendan, so, in true Phillip Marlowe fashion,
he sets out to solve the puzzle. And that’s the gimmick: The
plot, the characters, even the dialogue are all straight Raymond
Chandler. Gordon-Levitt plays the role just as Bogie would
have. He’s a former insider who’s turned his back on the game;
he’s got a touchy relationship with the authorities, who nonetheless
respect him (rather than a police chief, it’s an assistant
vice principal); he’s wily and self-destructive enough to
get the better of the muscle, though he takes some brutal
shots; he knows better than to trust a dame, etc. And, oh,
the dialogue. . . . It’s either gonna hit you right in the
pleasure center or drive you right out of your tree: “Quit
yer yappin’ and pour me one.” “Yer scratchin’ at the wrong
door.” “I’m not heeling you just to hook you.” It’s tough-guy
banter right out of ’46.
The plot, with its uncertain alliances and betrayals within
betrayals, rises to the level of canonical versions of the
detective genre, too (if you dig The Big Sleep, you
should dig this storyline). Setting it in a high school, however,
may just have been a stroke of genius. Writer-director Rian
Johnson has deftly, improbably, interwoven the appropriately
mercenary cold-bloodedness of the drug trade with the lurching
pitch of teenage emotionality. This tension provides some
very funny moments—as when the drug kingpin the Pin (Lukas
Haas) ends a tense meeting by asking Brendan, “You read any
Tolkien?”—but also allows for some direct gut-wrenching, as
well.
Sadly, viewers can no longer view depictions of teen violence
with detachment, can no longer assume a purely metaphorical
value. However, Johnson’s sure direction of an audacious concept
and the perfectly balanced performances of its actors seem
to have been informed by this knowledge. Brick good
scary, and scary good.
—John
Rodat
Let’s
Be Charitable
Friends
With Money
Directed
by Nicole Holofcener
Writer/director Nicole Holof-cener’s previous movies, Walking
and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, blazed with
a straightforward honesty—particularly when it came to depicting
the inner lives and worries of women—that you don’t usually
see in movies. Her latest, Friends With Money, displays
some of that openness, at least with respect to how people
dance around the subject of money, but in most respects, it’s
a distressing setback.
The friends with money here include Christine (Holofcener
stalwart Catherine Keener), a screenwriter who works with
her husband David (Jason Isaacs) in between arguments ostensibly
about the neighborhood-shattering remodeling of their house.
Then there’s Jane (Frances McDormand), a successful dress
designer disguised as a complete bitch on wheels whose various
neuroses include perceived threats to social equilibrium and
hair washing. The third is Franny (Joan Cusack), who is wrapped
in a delightfully self-centered cocoon with her doting hubby
Matt (Greg Germann). For some reason, these three women maintain
a friendship with housecleaner Olivia (Jennifer Aniston).
Even given the knowledge that Olivia had, until recently,
been a teacher at a posh private school, it seems inconceivable
that she, probably 10 years the junior of the other ladies,
would have had the common ground required to begin these friendships,
let alone maintain them.
That said, Holofcener slyly limns the edges of the quartet’s
shared lunches and gab sessions in such a way as to suggest
that Christine, Jane and Franny keep Olivia on as sort of
a charity case. At one point, Jane pointedly asks Franny why
she doesn’t just give the $2 million she’s slated toward a
particular charity to their friend instead. The pregnant pause
that envelopes the group at this point is the closest this
movie gets to saying anything real or substantial about the
way money comes into play in nearly any situation.
Another huge problem is, quite simply, Aniston, who spends
the great majority of her screen time looking like she’s got
a really bad blister from her Jimmy Choos. Casual viewings
of that horrible show, Friends, revealed that, by the
end of that long run, Aniston had developed a decent sense
of timing; it’s too bad that she—perhaps in a determined attempt
to look serious—keeps appearing as downtrodden, depressed
damsels in distress. The thing is, she can’t do it very well,
what with her limited cache of maybe three facial expressions,
each a variation on the pout.
That said, Olivia’s three friends aren’t worth investing too
much in either, no pun intended. While Holofcener’s intent,
lamely interjected near movie’s end, may have been to show
how women of a “certain age” are reacting to diminished prospects
and hopes, what we get instead are a trio of ridiculously
insulated beings with the emotional I.Q. of 3-year-olds. Franny,
who in some ways is the most interesting character (by fact
that she is so clearly happy with her life), nevertheless
comes off as downright vapid. It’s only when she snaps that
spending money on a fund-raiser for a particular cause is,
in fact, the way it’s done—temporarily shutting up her friends,
who complain that the money doesn’t go straight to the victims—that
the movie makes sparks. But Holofcener backs right away, perhaps
fearful that if she didn’t, her movie might actually have
something good to say about, well, friends with money.
—Laura
Leon
|
Classifieds
