New York Dispatch. 1.

The attacks of 9/11 begat the Tribeca Film Festival as a cultural event that was supposed to draw civilians back to Lower Manhattan after the smoke cleared. Conceived when landlords, businessmen and politicians wondered whether the economy of this neighborhood had been killed by the attacks, it has since grown into something permanent. It took longer for that to happen than for real estate values near Ground Zero to bounce back - less than a year, for the real estate - but in five years, Tribeca has become more of an institution than anything else that was planned down there.

I'll join the chorus in attributing the cinematic success of the event to Peter Scarlet, who has applied his mix of discernment and catholicity to a program that resisted it at first. It looks as if Scarlet's influence is here to stay, and I'm saying that as someone who believed that the San Francisco International Film Festival under his direction was the best film festival in the United States. Remember, before Scarlet came in, Tribeca was the cinematic equivalent of arena football. For all of you film nerds, the sports allusion isn't a compliment.

Today's program is broad and varied, and if you really want celebrities, they are there, too. Just check the schedule. Oddly, Tribeca's opener, United 93, doesn't have a celebrity to speak of. If you've seen Bloody Sunday, you know that Paul Greengrass's talent is for reconstructing dramatic historical events in all their detail on the screen (although Brits might say that Greengrass's sympathies in that earlier film were strongly pro-Irish). The 9/11 story that Greengrass retells in United 93 takes us from routine to cataclysm. The hype that's been heralding it stresses how disturbing it would be to see these events again, or how disturbing it would be for aggrieved family members to have to relive them. (But wait a minute - haven't the prosecutors at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in Washington replayed those events ad nauseam, in front of the families, complete with a heart-tugging appearance by Rudy Giuliani, "America's Mayor," as a witness?) The other pre-release conventional wisdom is that the film would be too violent and gruesome. Given what Greengrass was trying to film, i.e., killings, what other kind of film could he make?

In fact, Greengrass could have done what the television and cable networks (and the politicians) did, and turn the horrors of 9/11 into the Reichstag fire for the Bush administration, an event that mobilized the country's fear and its appetite for horror and instant revenge into war against a regime that had nothing to do with the attacks. It didn't take long before the Fox-watchers seemed convinced that, as Art Spiegelman likes to point out, "all the high-jackers were Iraqis, except for the ones who were French."

Beyond that, Greengrass could have also avoided ever showing a dead body on the screen. Remember the "falling commas" leaping from the towers that were shown in every country besides the United States?

With United 93, hyped as the "appropriate" film to premiere at Ground Zero, New Yorkers will get a reality check, or something close enough to it. Within a carefully, plausibly designed production, actors who are not stars (and often not actors) play out a story that we know fairly well. We certainly know the end - an airliner bound for a target in DC crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, thanks to passengers who stormed the cockpit. As a drama on the screen, we get a bit more. The rank and file in air traffic control do what they can, the government high-flyers who are supposed to make decisions don't do what they could, and ordinary airline customers reach into themselves to do what they never could have imagined under appalling circumstances. The tension comes from their race to achieve what they can before United 93 goes down.

The acting in United 93 is solid, which is what you would expect if you had seen Bloody Sunday, Greengrass's reconstruction of the pivotal massacre of 1972 that turned the open wounds of Derry in Northern Ireland into open violence. Greengrass uses actors, whose faces you don't know, to play the faceless armies who make everything in daily life work - almost everything. The performances are just about seamless, even the performance as the Air Traffic Control boss by Ben Sliney, who played that same role on 9/11.

What you don't get here in this inaction movie is explanation and introspection on the part of the characters. The camera observes the facts as a lot of people who were taken by surprise saw them, with numbness and fear. We also see the high-jackers - at least one of them with hesitation in first class; others with bull-headed determination. We don't learn much more about them than what we can see on their faces. The passengers who fought back, whose conversations we do hear, are indeed real heroes, minus the sanctimony. Officials above the management of Air Traffic are just what they were back then, absent. I do have to wonder whom Cheney would have shot if he had been in a position to fight back.

A film like United 93 is ipso facto incomplete in its ambition to recreate a limited number of crucial moments, so it's a stroke of savvy programming at Tribeca to end the festival with Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, which made its world premiere at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival. If the war on terror began with government retreat, the waging of the war as seen by Winterbottom involved false arrests and lies (lies being the gift that keeps on giving. Just listen to Cheney's aides try to explain in an innocuous lie this time around that he was looking over papers when a photograph shows him fast asleep during last week's official Chinese visit.) In case you don't know the script already, three men who enter Afghanistan while traveling to Pakistan get caught up when the US throws a net over the town that they are visiting. They are wrongly accused of being terrorists, which they deny. Bound and blindfolded, they join the army of "hardcore" prisoners in the war on terror. After two years of confinement in Guantanamo, evidence is produced to show their innocence, to the great shame of the US and the UK. Who knows how many other innocent men were and are there? Our government isn't telling. I'll have more about Guantanamo in a later dispatch. Suffice it to say that the film confirms Winterbottom's status as one of the filmmakers worth watching today.

It's no surprise that even Tribeca, which gets some $5 million of its annual budget from Bush-acolyte and 2008 Republican presidential aspirant George Pataki (the governor of New York), has a clear anti-Bush agenda. This is New York City, after all. Part of the film coalition questioning and satirizing The Decider (as W now likes to call himself) is Al Franken: God Spoke. Directed by Chris Hegedus and produced by her husband, DA Pennebaker, this doc-on-the-run follows Franken through the creation of Air America and the misbegotten 2004 Kerry campaign, which he served generously. Franken is the son of a comedian-manque, whose own story also figures in the film. (Is that why he seems to have no allergy to attention?) Franken seems to have given Hegedus and her team full access, the one element which Pennebaker maintains is essential to making a doc. He has a line for every occasion - often a funny one - and a welcome disdain for good taste in confrontations with his God-fearing adversaries. Choice moments in the film come when Franken does a Henry Kissinger impression for Dr K himself when he encounters the Bomber of Cambodia at a party that he crashes during the 2006 Republican convention. Flummoxed by Franken's wit, the wit-impaired Bill O'Reilly suggests that he's deranged. It would have been interesting if Hegedus and her team asked people outside political circles if anyone really believed that. For all the triumphs of the one-liner, the Democrats still lost with John Kerry (who banned staffers from telling "why the long face?" jokes). The doc ends with the next potential lap in Franken's political journey - a US Senate seat representing Minnesota. Franken pleases his fans by reaching into his scatalogical bag of tricks in a speech to  a local crowd, and by linking himself to one of the most humane voices in American politics, the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Can he win if he runs? Remember, Minnesota was the state that elected Jesse Ventura governor. There's the sequel.

Another doc not to miss that addresses The Decider's failures of judgment is Who Killed the Electric Car?, the inquiry into the demise of a vehicle developed by General Motors that proved to be too competitive with the sputtering internal combustion engine that's been GM's bread and butter for a century. (Bush now supports hydrogen cars, which would cost a fortune to make and even more to fuel.) In response to California regulations passed to fight pollution, GM produced an efficient and elegantly aerodynamic car, the EV1, that ran completely on electricity that was provided at fueling stations - now in ruins - that were built all over the state. Leased to consumers and celebrities from Mel Gibson to Tom Hanks - to ensure that GM could eventually take the cars back - the vehicles were reliable and quiet, and they didn't pollute. They could also go from 0 to 60 mph in 7 seconds. Yet, without trying too hard, GM claimed it couldn't make enough money on them and recalled the cars from drivers who had no legal choice but to hand them over. Then GM shredded them into confetti.

It's all in the film, much of which was culled from videotapes shot by EV1 owners, who kept vigils on the parking lots where their recalled and very drive-able cars were stockpiled for junking. At every stage, Republican politicians in Washington sided with the company. Remember, Andrew Card's job before he became The Decider's chief of staff was top lobbyist for GM. This doc is a valuable case history about the "free market" and the real enemies of entrepreneurship. See it, and then try to keep a straight face when you read about the Bush energy plan.

Posted by dwhudson at April 25, 2006 12:57 AM