Everyday heroes
'Flight 93' honors 9/11 passengers without sensationalizing their story
There's something offensive about bringing the TV nation inside the claustrophobic terror of Flight 93, the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001. Those last intimate moments with strangers, the cruel awareness of doom, the phone calls, the tears -- shouldn't they belong to those who perished and their surviving loved ones? Is no tragedy immune to our national compulsion to invade privacy and defy mystery?
But A&E's ''Flight 93," which premieres tonight at 9, is both respectful and soundly dramatic. It represents one of our culture's better attempts at processing the 2001 attacks, as the event makes its way into everything from ''Law & Order" and ''American Dad!" to a forthcoming theatrical film also titled ''Flight 93." After all, the alternative to having TV and movies about 9/11 is for us to delete the tragedy from our collective memory, to empower it by ignoring it. If we don't tell stories about disasters, we'll forget them once the news trucks leave. We can only hope, as we hope from all entertainment, that two or three of the many products we see have a brain, and a heart.
''Flight 93" has enough of both. It plays like a low-key homage to the victims, precisely because it doesn't insult us or them with schmaltz and overblown tribute. There is manipulation afoot, of course, as director Peter Markle repeatedly tries to break our hearts by juxtaposing innocent children in suburbia with the imminent deaths of their fathers.
But the movie doesn't exaggerate the heroics of those involved with the United Airlines flight, both on the ground and in the air; it never oversizes them into unbelievability. There's no ''Poseidon Adventure" dramatic inflation in the air, and no grandiose star turns from the relatively unknown cast. I was dreading the movie's version of the ''Let's Roll" moment, when Todd Beamer (Brennan Elliott) utters the words that have come to represent the courage of the passengers. Surely it would be a self-conscious scene. But the movie wisely chooses not to overemphasize the anthemic phrase. The camera rests on the phone on a seat, while we hear Beamer's call to arms.
''Flight 93" has an effective real-time feel, from the boarding process to the passengers' attempt to ''take back the airplane," as Tom Burnett (Jeffrey Nordling) puts it. And that gradual pace heightens each excruciating moment of the flight. When Nicole Miller (Meghan Heffern) talks emotionally on a cellphone to her mother, their conversation subsides into a slow silence that is deafening. They know this is their last contact. They are sitting together in time, if not space, unable to part and yet unable to speak. It's restrained, which is why it haunts.
One of the more memorable images in ''Flight 93" comes early, when the terrorists sitting in various parts of the plane start their takeover. In unison, without looking at one another but with intensity burning in their eyes, they tie red bands around their heads. The passengers who see them have no sense of what the headbands represent, and there is a suspended moment of quiet mystery before the plane erupts into fear and violence. It's another scene that resonates because it doesn't knock us over the head with significance.
''Flight 93" is not a must-see film. It's well done, but not revelatory. It shows how a TV movie about an incendiary subject can succeed without resorting to overstatement. It's straightforward and suspenseful and a solid tribute. 