Movie Review: Paul Greengrass's United 93: Guts - Page 3

Sidebar: Lifeboat affords the best opportunity on film to see the Bankhead legend, apart from bits and pieces in such pictures as Faithless (1932), which does provide her with a classic exit line. Having been thrown out of a house party by the social climbing Mrs. Blainey, Bankhead's Carol, a fallen heiress, is stopped by the woman's husband, who tells her that his wife isn't "sore" at her, she's just afraid of the "high-class competition." Carol laughs dismissively at this—she can't entirely share the joke because he couldn't possibly know how far she's fallen—and, waving the handbag he's fattened with $1,000, says with self-consciously trampy gallantry as she departs, "Oh! Reassure her, Mr. Blainey, reassure her!"

Greengrass is a refined political artist, but United 93 goes pretty much entirely for gut reactions. He doesn't exploit them; he doesn't need to. I became aware of this when the passengers are planning their counterattack and one of them proposes to break the arm of the terrorist who appears to be holding the detonator of a bomb strapped around his waist. The passenger doesn't say it with relish, and Greengrass doesn't emphasize it particularly, but my response was, Yeah, break his fucking arm!

These throbbings of vengeance strike me as inevitable, even for civilized people. There's a point at which the only possible response to fascistic force is a greater counterforce, and such a counterforce requires an emotional thrust that can't be very fine-grained. I'm okay with the coarse emotion generated here, but I don't need a movie to generate it for me. Greengrass's superior technical skill doesn't add much to the subject matter, as opposed to the experience in the theater, and it's not always that superior. In the one strand of allegory, for instance, a lone European passenger wants to appease the terrorists; when the Americans are about to act he tries to single himself out from them. This is reminiscent of the passenger in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) who hops off the stopped train waving a white flag; the fascists do to him what fascists do to appeasers. I believe the point is valid, in both cases, but nonetheless so crude in the performance as to appear silly.

Greengrass's breakthrough feature Bloody Sunday (2002) uses a similar constant-present-tense technique to recreate another historic convergence of forces, on 30 January 1972 when British troops fired on unarmed Catholic civil-rights protestors in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 and setting off the bloodiest year of the "Troubles."

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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