United

There was a centenary of W.H. Auden’s birth last week and the following are lines from his poem Musee des Beaux Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters…..
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forlorn cry
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

He also commented: “In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate”

Paul Greengrass’ United 93, recently released on DVD, is a powerful “disintoxicant”, it is something amazing in its depiction of a plane falling out of the sky on September 11, when the actions of the passengers forced the hijackers to crash into Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and is definitely not an important failure.

Maybe the ploughman would have reacted if he were closer to the centre because as the film so admirably illustrates, levels of courage are always greatest nearest the centre.

The director’s ten years with World in Action and his piece on Bloody Sunday have earned him enough confidence to direct a cinematic reconstruction of the “one act of heroism on a day of defeat and pain”. He has produced a masterpiece and his real time depiction of events earned him a BAFTA and a Best Director Oscar nomination.

The film, with its judicial editorial decisions and its knowledge that its power would be diminished by overly intimate fictionalised conversations, is perfectly complemented by the DVD’s supplementary interviews and it leaves an indelible impression.

In the film Deora Bodley, a young university student, sitting peacefully before the hijackers have acted, writes in her journal. The narrative does not reveal the content but in the interviews her mother reads a poem from her daughter’s diary and struggles to say “I didn’t know I was raising a girl like that”

One of the biggest questions at the development stage must have been “has enough time elapsed?” but the extensive consultation with the victims’ families enabled the filmmakers to convince the shattered households it was to be a sensitive production.

One mother remarks “it was never going to be soon enough”

Passengers and crew are depicted honestly by actors deliberately chosen for their ordinariness and the portrayal of events in air traffic control are given enhanced realism by the deployment of actual officers who worked through the tragedy of the day.

The reconstruction of the phone calls made by the passengers after they realised how the events were likely to unfold, and their need to express those three little words is, in the hands of Greengrass, an unsentimental, powerful, illuminating display of humanity.

Unlike Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, which focuses on two policeman trapped under the rubble of the towers, there are no jarring deployments of slow motion dream sequences, no badge-kissing evocations of bravery, just subtle visual poignancy, such as the slow closing of the passenger exit.

The heroism, when it comes, is practical rather than evangelical and it produces a harrowing final twenty-five minutes.

This is an exceptional piece of filmmaking as it forces us bystanders to stop blissfully whistling “Obla Di, Obla Da” and listen to the forlorn cry.