Movie Review: Paul Greengrass's United 93: Guts - Page 2

I do wish, however, that Greengrass had shaped the story more. The movie has structure only on the outside, not on the inside, which surely is a definition of "hollow." In this partial transcript of an April 2006 interview with Rush Limbaugh, Greengrass suggests an idea: "that group of ordinary men and women actually were the first amongst us to enter the post-9/11 world." But we don't know what these men and women were like before the hijacking so we don't see how they change. He also justifies making the movie so soon after the events by saying, "It's time we went together back to this experience, because we may find that we agree about more than we think at the moment." He's referring to the political divisions that have become so pronounced since September 11th and hoping we can become as "united" in our response as the people on flight 93 (no that we know what differences, if any, they overcame in the desperation of events). But again, nothing in the movie dramatizes this aspiration.

Without an organizing dramatic idea, the episodic back-and-forth between plane and tower helplessly makes United 93 resemble a much more conventional disaster movie, a restrained, less campily characterful version of Airport (1970), one charged with political emotion. For American audiences, however, that political emotion inevitably comes with the subject; it's not an attainment of the movie's. And though the three groups of characters are viewed somewhat differently, they're filmed in a unified style that gets a bit monotonous. Those soap opera dummies in Airport at least add a little variety, even to derision. United 93's version of the doomed flight finally isn't very different from the gray, panic-stricken version that runs in my head.

By comparison, the subject matter of Greengrass's hellaciously swift international spy thriller The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is entirely forgettable. Its generic paranoia about government intelligence ops doesn't relate to life as we know it in any way. Nonetheless, Greengrass presents it as urgent, which is laughabale, but at the same time the crappy plot enforces on him variations in handling and rhythm that he would do well to carry over into his more respectable work. (He also gained from working with skillful high-profile actors, particularly Joan Allen and Julia Stiles.)

Though far more discreetly handled, United 93 gives off the same feeling as a World War II picture involving civilians, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for instance, in which the non-combatant survivors of a torpedoed ship share a lifeboat with the captain of the U-boat that sank them. At the climax, the democratic civilians finally realize the Nazi is up to no good and do away with him with their bare hands. Lifeboat is cruder than United 93, in no small part because the situation has been faked to provide some low-down high-comic material for Tallulah Bankhead, which turns its ideological demonstration into something resembling entertainment. But the demonstration also makes Lifeboat more sententious, and by that same stroke less visceral, than United 93.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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