"Civic Duty: Go See 'United 93'"

Sunday, May 7, 2006

Column
Civic Duty: Go See 'United 93'
Samuel Johnson was right: People more often need to be reminded than
informed.
By George F. Will
The Washington (DC) Post


In most movies made to convey dread, the tension flows from uncertainty
about what will happen. In "United 93," terror comes from knowing exactly
what will happen. People who associate cinematic menace with maniacs
wielding chain saws will find that there can be an almost unbearable menace
in the quotidian -- in the small talk of passengers waiting in the boarding
area with those who will murder them, in the routine shutting of the plane's
door prior to departure from Newark Airport on Sept. 11, 2001.

But two uncertainties surrounded "United 93": Would it find an audience?
Should it?
 
It has found one, which is remarkable, given that in 2005 most moviegoers --
57 percent -- were persons 12 to 29 years old. Twenty-nine percent were
persons 12 to 24. These age cohorts do not seek shattering, saddening
experiences to go with their popcorn.

But in its first weekend "United 93" was the second most-watched movie, with
the top average gross per theater among major releases. It was on 1,795
screens, and 71 percent of viewers were 30 or older.

To the long list of Britain's contributions to American cinema -- Charles
Chaplin, Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Stan Laurel, Deborah Kerr, Vivien Leigh,
Maureen O'Hara, Ronald Colman, David Niven, Boris Karloff, Alfred Hitchcock
and others -- add Paul Greengrass, writer and director of "United 93." He
imported into Hollywood the commodity most foreign to it: good taste. This
is especially shown in the ensemble of unknown character actors and
non-actors who play roles they know -- a real pilot plays the pilot, a
former flight attendant plays the head flight attendant -- and several
persons who play on screen the roles they played on Sept. 11.

Greengrass's scrupulosity is evident in the movie's conscientious, minimal
and minimally speculative departures from the facts about the flight
painstakingly assembled for the Sept. 11 commission report. This is
emphatically not a "docudrama" like Oliver Stone's execrable "JFK," which
was "history" as a form of literary looting in which the filmmaker used just
enough facts to lend a patina of specious authenticity to tendentious
political ax-grinding.

A New York Times story on the "politics of heroism" dealt with the question
of whether the movie was "inclusive."

Well, perhaps. "United 93" did violate some egalitarian nicety by suggesting
that probably not all the passengers were equally heroic. Amazingly, no one
has faulted the movie for ethnic profiling: All the hijackers are portrayed
as young, fervently devout Muslim men. Report Greengrass to the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.

In a movie as spare and restrained as its title, the only excess is the
suggestion, itself oblique, that the government response was even more
confused than was to be expected. Most government people, like the rest of
us, were in the process of having their sense of the possible abruptly and
radically enlarged.

Going to see "United 93" is a civic duty because Samuel Johnson was right:
People more often need to be reminded than informed. After an astonishing 56
months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become
dangerously immune to astonishment. The movie may quicken our appreciation
of the measures and successes -- many of which must remain secret -- that
have kept would-be killers at bay.

The editors of National Review were wise to view "United 93" in the dazzling
light still cast by a Memorial Day address, "The Soldier's Faith," delivered
in 1895 by a veteran of Ball's Bluff, Antietam and other Civil War battles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said why understanding that faith is important:

"In this snug, over-safe corner of the world . . . we may realize that our
comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little
space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the
world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. . . . Out of heroism
grows faith in the worth of heroism."

The message of the movie is: We are all potential soldiers. And we all may
be, at any moment, at the war's front, because in this war the front can be
anywhere.

The hinge on which the movie turns are 13 words that a passenger speaks,
without histrionics, as he and others prepare to rush the cockpit, shortly
before the plane plunges into a Pennsylvania field. The words are: "No one
is going to help us. We've got to do it ourselves." Those words not only
summarize this nation's situation in today's war but also express a
citizen's general responsibilities in a free society.


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