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| May 4th, 2006 |
If UNITED 93 is the first entry in what promises to be an entire library of archival movie projects about the tragedies of 9/11, it will pretty much depend on both the film s success or failure at the box office and the tolerance level of an audience that extends beyond the families and friends of the survivors themselves. How much more, a lot of people are already asking, can everyone take?
Certainly there is no escape from the inevitable disaster that befell the 40 courageous passengers and crew members aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, the fourth hijacked plane on that fateful day when terrorism erupted on the American landscape. We know what happened. We know how it ends. And still, this sad and gripping movie revealing the mounting tension of events in real time of approximately one hour, 45 minutes leaves you limp and devastated. It is a much better realized and more professionally executed movie than I expected, and it affects us all. Yes, it happened here!
Writer-director Paul Greengrass doesn t miss a thing. From the pre-dawn prayers of the terrorists in a motel room in Newark to the final surge of heroism and honor when the passengers fought to regain control of the plane from their hijackers a little more than 90 minutes after takeoff, you get the anatomy of aggression and rebellion that signifies the dangerous DNA of a terrifying new world of global terrorism. Unaware that three other flights were simultaneously heading for their targets at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the people on Flight 93 were going about their early morning rituals men reading newspapers, tourists studying maps of Yosemite, housewives anxious to get home, seniors gloating over photos of their grandkids, pretty flight attendants serving gossip with the breakfast snacks when the pilots first heard about the chaos at the air-traffic-control centers on the ground and the smoke that was encircling Manhattan.
Panic did not implode until the four terrorists on board rose from their seats with a homemade bomb, invaded the cockpit, killed both United pilots, and re-routed the plane towards the nation s capital. Contacting their families on laptops, cell phones, and credit-card-activated Airfones, the passengers were stunned, then anguished, then hysterical, and finally seizing the need to switch into control mode.
The most nerve-frying thing about the whole ordeal, in retrospect, is the confusion, the mixed signals from the FAA, the erroneous information, and the short-circuitry of the shock waves, on the plane and among both the air controllers and the military. Mr. Greengrass is careful not to affix blame, but a gasp went through the audience when it is finally revealed that the military couldn t get permission or clearance to dispatch fighter planes to the rescue because nobody could find President George W. Bush. Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 a.m. in a field near Shanksville, Pa. At 10:18 a.m., President Bush finally came to life, ordering military action, but the word was never passed on to the pilots. All I could think of was the cynical lyrics to the politically satirical Johnny Mercer song The Country s in the Very Best of Hands. Not so funny in this context, but it s true enough to turn your blood cold.
Production values are excellent. Camerawork captures the claustrophobic action and chaos on board, even the sweat and near-nervous collapse of the four terrorists. Mr. Greengrass avoids sentimentality, even in the intimate last-minute cellphone goodbyes.
A large cast of unknowns contribute strongly to the authenticity of this film. It wouldn t have the same impact with Brad Pitt as the gay rugby player Mark Bingham, Tom Cruise as the pilot, Capt. John Dahl, or Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan as the brave flight attendants who gathered all of the knives, forks, and fire extinguishers for defense weapons. The heroism of the 40 people who made a group decision not to die without a fight really leaves you slack-jawed. I also admire the way every effort has been made to give the film maximum realism with a moment-to-moment naturalism that often seems improvised. The actors are all salient to the facts amassed in exhaustive research; even the hijackers are perfect. (They were not from Iraq!)
All told, United 93 is an exemplary attempt to re-live history, inspired, and powerful. Personally, I have survived all I want to about 9/11. Isn t it time to resurface, regroup, reorganize, and move on? This is just one aspect of a national tragedy that is still too recent to revisit without anxiety. I don t want to live or die through another one anytime soon.
For Andy Garcia, THE LOST CITY is a long-time dream come true: a passionate valentine to his native Cuba that recaptures the glamour, sensuality, and decadence of Havana in 1958, when it was nearing the end of the Mardi Gras reign of General Batista and shivering under the storm cloud of pre-Castro revolution. You gotta call this one a genuine labor of love.
Wallowing in nostalgia in his directorial debut, the fearless and versatile actor (he was last seen on the screen playing Modigliani), who also co-produced it, co-wrote the script, and even composed the musical score himself, spent almost 20 years getting The Lost City on the screen. Here at last, the finished product arrives with mixed blessings. Sincerely conceived and beautifully photographed in lush tropical colors that intoxicate, it s too long and politically confusing, loaded with too many tertiary characters, painfully self-indulgent, and darting from one subplot to the next like a butterfly with hiccups.
The labyrinthian plot revolves around the affluent Fellove family, headed by an upper-class professor of philosophy who abhors the corruption of Batista s capitalist dictatorship, preaches democratic reform, and raises his three sons to support the right causes. Mr. Garcia plays eldest son Fico, owner of the glittery El Tropico nightclub, a tourist attraction where the rum flows and the floor shows are lavish. An apolitical observer who never making waves, enjoys the perks of a fluid economy, and records the changing times with his video camera, Fico uses his popular club as a buffer from the winds of revolution.
Meanwhile, his handsome younger brothers Ricardo (Enrique Murciano) and Luis (Nestor Carbonell) are ardent anarchists and violent dissidents who try to overthrow the government, stupidly believing a Communist revolution will result in freedom and democracy. When Luis leads a daring assassination attempt in a raid on the presidential palace that lands him in prison and ruins his life, Ricardo heads into the jungles to fight shoulder to shoulder with Che and Castro, and Luis gorgeous wife, Aurora (played by supermodel Ines Sastre), ends up in Fico s bed.
The wandering plot (culled from a 300-page draft by the great writer G. Cabrera Infante, who died in 2005) features betrayal, disgrace, adultery, suicide, and escape, often shifting moods so fast that we lose track of the characters. The movie devotes a lot of time to the splashy musical numbers at the El Tropico, but it fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution. The pacing is so lazy that after the big war scenes set the screen ablaze with gunfire, there s still 45 minutes to go.
Wafting through the melange are ill-fated cameos by Dustin Hoffman as Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky and Bill Murray as an American parasite with no name and obviously no ethnicity, wearing short pants and acting as a court jester and funny sidekick who never says anything funny or relevant at all. The film s biggest surprise is Millie Perkins, a far cry from the way she looked as Anne Frank back in 1959 but astoundingly good as the Cuban matriarch struggling to preserve her family values and secure a naive vision of her sons as the future pillars of a once-proud country.
Cuba, played by the Dominican Republic, leaves us with the scarred impression of a ravaged country, decimated by greed and ignorance. Between Batista and his terror squads, Castro and his Communist insurgents, and Lansky and the Mob, Havana changed from a once-placid and civilized Old World paradise to a devastated and lost metropolis. Mr. Garcia makes no secret of his unilateral hatred for Batista, Che, and Castro, blaming them equally for turning Havana from a capital city into a capital sin. In that respect his film will be embraced by Cuban exiles in Miami, denounced by others who refused to leave when they could still get out, and considered a big yawn by everyone else.
But there is nothing controversial about the sincerity of his ode to the bedrock of his ancestry a country in ruins, existing now only in shattered memories. His Cuba is like a rose it has petals and it has thorns, but no matter how you grab it, in the end it grabs you.
On the other side of the moon, take my sage advice and avoid at all cost a dismal, pretentious, and brain-damaged piece of New Age junk art called LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN. This overwrought muddle, derived from the worst elements of Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and incompetently directed by Paul McGuignan, is a model of sloppy frat-house humor, incompetence, and smart-aleck film-school experimentation that tosses plot points and disjointed characters around like Tinker Toys that the dog chewed on.
Everything in it every confusion, every line of unspeakable dialogue, every red herring, every camera setup has been borrowed from some movie you ve seen before. Bruce Willis snaps the neck of a young man in an airline terminal, then ships him in a truck to New York. Cut to Josh Hartnett, a vagrant named Slevin staying in a friend s apartment. The girl next door (Lucy Liu) is a coroner who lives on peanut butter. A mugger breaks his nose and he gets dragged off in a towel to see The Boss (Morgan Freeman), who has one leg and keeps corpses in his walk-in freezer. The black gangsta cliche says Slevin owes him $97,000 but he ll cancel the debt if Slevin will kill the gay son of his arch-rival, a gangster who is also a rabbi (Ben Kingsley).
The Jewish gangsta cliche says Slevin owes him another $33,000. Clearly a case of mistaken identity that drops dead while tickling the funny bones of a few gullible critics who relish in stocking up blurbs for quote ads. Nothing about this miserable gibberish makes one word of sense. It s not supposed to. The actors are all laughing while they try to speak their lines. They are all abominable.
Josh Hartnett can t even act clad only in a towel. No wonder. Here s a sample of the idiot dialogue by Jason Smilovic: I ve gotta see The Boss by tomorrow morning. What are you going to tell him? I m gonna tell him what any man with two penises tells his tailor when the tailor asks him Do you dress to the right or the left? What s that? Yes.