Real World Situation

United 93 and Akeelah and the Bee

“United 93”, 2006. Written and Directed by Paul Greengrass. With a cast of unfamous actors and actresses and many of the grounds crew, air traffic control, and, perhaps the star, Ben Sliney.

Now showing at theaters throughout town.

Around the turn of the last century, the Coney Island amusement park called Dreamland staged thrilling recreations of the latest disasters to bustling and eager crowds. Patrons would be given firsthand accounts, involving real water and flame, of the Galveston flood, the Mount Pelee eruption, and, barely two months after the fact, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. These were just a few among dozens of theatrical disasters, one of which, the Boer War of 1902, involved many of the soldiers and commanders who had fought. Oddly enough, this involved both the British and Boers–no one, it seemed, was immune from the spotlight.

So, too, flies United 93 onto our screen. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the connection between these past theatrics and this movie are obvious to me. In fact, the character who we come to know best is that of Ben Sliney, the Operations Manager at the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia. Who plays himself. Along with many of the air traffic controllers and grounds crew.

Whatever your feeling about this, United 93 is an amazing accomplishment. Director Paul Greengrass is to be given tremendous credit for shaping the performances of these nonprofessionals and barely-professionals; a look at some of the actors on IMDB reveals a cast with little experience, who are excellent–though they really don’t hold any one scene as we aren’t allowed to know them as characters. Only Sliney, a man thrust into action on his very first day, can offer what can really be called a centering performance. And he’s magnificent.

United 93 opens with a profound melancholy. September 11 was an unbelievably perfect day. Sunny. Crisp, with a touch of autumn in the air. The leaves changing. A back-to-shool quiet in the neighborhoods. Watching this, I wished I could go back to this time, when the President was merely a buffoon, the 2000 election was the worst thing that happened to us, and we weren’t suspicious, hateful, weary of war and of partisanship. In these first minutes we see, ever so briefly, many of the passengers that come on board–a sleepy teenage girl listening to music, a pair of hiking pals who’re going to hit Yosemite, a businessman returning home with his cell phone fused to his ear, a young athlete dressed in his college colors. And the terrorists: some gawking forlornly at images of supermodels on the airport walls, nervous as all hell, whispering quietly ‘I love you’ to someone on the phone (yes, that was the terrorist). Greengrass captures this quiet minutiae, from the inane sounds of the weatherman yakking about sunshine in the background, to the lame attempts at airport security, to the sleepyheads reading on board the flight and ignoring the safety instructions that will ultimately do no one any good at all. And when the door to the aircraft are finally sealed, only we know that so, too, is their fate. And ours.

As soon as United 93 is airborne, the film switches to real-time in a way that is not obtrusive or obvious. It’s hard enough to relive these moments, to watch the CNN coverage again and again, all the while ground control is baffled, utterly and completely, by what we now know is reality. Events move swiftly yet not swiftly enough: one plane stops responding to an air traffic controller’s calls, causing concern, then action, then panic–and then vanishes off the screen. The men and women in the ground control haven’t a clue what’s going on, as they have no windows to look out of, no television to distract them. Only we know the truth–only to have it yanked out from under us as well. We discover that the plane that vanished is not the one that smashed into the World Trade Center, that was another plane, observed by a different controller. This is the second one to hit the building–and we’re suddenly plunged into the same chaos. If you’re a connoisseur of editing pay close attention here, for the cuts between Virginia, New York, and the plane keep the tension at its highest without confusion. Although we know the results, we are as baffled as the military (who yell “This is a real world situation!” in frustration), the people who keep the planes up, and even the President.

United 93 continues its symphony of fascinating little details–of Sliney wondering aloud how many planes are airborne while in the background a map is absolutely glowing over little dots representing the 4,000 flying aircraft, to the pilot of Flight 93 shaking his personal bottle of hot sauce onto his breakfast, to the passengers wasting their time on their last flight over maps, cheap novels, the Wall Street Journal. And by the time the terrorist reveal themselves and the violence follows, we are at the point of nearly unbearable tension.

Unfortunately, the film begins to flag once we’re stuck on board. Clearly, Greengrass tried his best to piece together clues from the conversations between those on board and those on the ground and it’s a moot point, really, to wonder if he got it right. What he does, however, is inject certain plot points and sentimentality into the film that hadn’t existed up to this point. While it’s no doubt tragic that the passengers of United 93 were able to talk to loved ones just before their deaths, we get this en masse in conversation after conversation, an attempt to humanize characters that we do not ever get to know. It is as if Greengrass had lost faith in the fact that we know that these are real people, and this is powerful enough. According to press releases, Greengrass made certain to have his actors communicate with the survivors of the flight–what then does the family of one (and I believe it’s Alan Anthony Beaven, played by Simon Poland) think of his portrayal as an appeasing, European-accented man, who even goes so far as to try and warn the terrorists of the passenger rebellion? None of this necessary: United 93 is almost literally a white-knuckle film without having to rely on these mechanics.

Still, United 93 is an impressive piece of work, even if I’m not certain that I understand why it was made, or why we would see it. It’s impossible to say, of course, but it also strikes me as the kind of film that dates badly, in part because the tension of the opening hour rests, I believe, on the back of our shared experience. Perhaps this is why the second half of the film is, in my mind, not so much an exercise in heroics but a cathartic revenge where we have not had any in real life.

I’ve heard over and over that this is a great film no one will want to see. Frankly, my guess is that United 93 is going to shoot to number one and rake in tons of money and be seen quite often, probably even at some IMAX experience. To suggest that it’s important because we shouldn’t forget seems odd considering 9/11 happened less than five years ago and remains quite fresh in everyone’s mind. Unlike films about the holocaust–which were necessary to inform a gentile population of events they had little knowledge and didn’t see cinematic interpretation until nearly a generation had passed–United 93 comes almost on the heels of the event itself. Like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, the entirety of Black Hawk Down, and even, perhaps, like the staged disasters in Dreamland, maybe United 93 satisfies a deeper, more secret appeal–that hunger to be there, in a pretend disaster, of taking part in something larger and greater than we’re used to, even though it’s a fantasy. Is that wrong?

“Akeelah and the Bee”, 2006. Written and directed by Doug Atichson. Starring Keke Palmer, Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Gilbert Gottfried look-alike Curtis Armstrong, J. R. Villarreal, Sean Michael, and Sahara Garey.

Now playing in theaters around town. Though not that many theaters around town.

God save Akeelah and the Bee. I can’t imagine that the studio and the folks at Starbucks Coffee, who produced this (and did not, to my utter amazement, have one of their coffee shops in the movie) figured they were going to open against the United 93 juggernaut. Which is somewhat of a shame because Akeelah is a fun movie–tense, exciting, funny, sad and uplifting. Yes, one must wade through tidepools of sentimentality and shake off tangled plot twists that make virtually no sense at all. And yet, it’s a movie I wish had when I was a kid, a movie I dream white suburban kids would watch along with inner-city kids with half a future.

The plot is simple, going from straightforward and touching and eventually fraying into ludicrousness: Akeelah Anderson is a young girl, very smart, enrolled at an inner-city Los Angeles school that hasn’t got anywhere near the resources to engage a girl as sharp as her. Akeelah whips off tests like they’re Kleenex to be discarded, always gets her ‘A’, but is doing poorly because she skips school and ignores homework.

Reluctantly, Akeelah enrolls in the school spelling bee and is discovered to have an amazing ability to spell anything, like ‘prospicience’–a word that’s not even in my computer’s spell-check. Along comes Laurence Fishburne, a professor with a mangled past, who decides to help both his pal running the school (Curtis Armstrong) and Akeelah by coaching her for the national spelling bee.

Of course, there’s interference: Akeelah’s single mom wants her to stop, as the girl’s already ignoring her homework and mom can’t wrap her mind around the benefits of a spelling bee. Akeelah’s father’s dead, her sister’s got a baby already, and her brother’s falling into the hands of local gangs. There are bullies; the requisite scene where Akeelah might lose her best friend; Fishburne’s lost a child long ago and has so much pain he might have to stop coaching Akeelah–this last one, and many of the final climaxes, are clearly the work of a screenwriter who can’t find enough plot points within this simple story to engage us, and some of them become quite infuriating. But the end falls on a note of shared triumph, and I was surprised to find myself gulping with emotion.

Akeelah and the Bee also has some moving scenes of poverty: like Akeelah trying to study while police helicopters fly overhead (a common occurrence in L.A.), taking an hour bus ride to a suburban school to work with a spelling club, and seeing out the window some wealthy white kids jamming to gangsta rap. The film doesn’t shy away from the concerns of the inner city, nor does it abandon the people there. It does tend to slip into an overzealous need to make everything shiny toward the end–having the neighborhood drunk helping Akeelah with her spelling is a bit much, as is the rapper who, it’s suggested earlier, might be engaged in drug dealing or robbery, but later is a frustrated poet and Akeelah’s champion.

Keke Palmer, who plays Akeelah, is a great find–the film is worth seeing just for her performance, and I’ll tell you that it’s a joy to see young actors and actresses play their hearts out, and take on a role with such moxie. Hopefully we’ll see a lot of her. The rapport between Palmer and Laurence Fishburne is nice, I’ll always love Angela Bassett, and the music is well-used.

The plot is often ham-handed, but then I have to say, so what? This is a children’s movie, and one that kids everywhere could stand to see, more so than any of the CGI crap that’s out there. Parents could do much worse than show their charges a film with people, with real troubles, and one that emphasizes hard work and studying.

When I was young, my favorite book was a lovely little thing called The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. It involved a young African-American child going wowsers over a good foot of snow that had been dumped in his neighborhood, and his adventures outside. I was jazzed by the fact that a) this took place in a dingy apartment building like I lived in, b) the kid was raised by a single mom, and c) we shared the same first name. The joy of the book was heightened by our similarities and made me feel like there were stories in my own little world, so unlike the norm I witnessed on TV. I’d like to think that there are children in the run down neighborhoods of Los Angeles, of Detroit, and of Minneapolis, who will see Akeelah and the Bee and sense that there’s a movie on their own block, and that by simply reading, by being there for friends and neighbors, they’re the star.