Reviews of two Films coming out. The "Times", of course, is never happy if Bush is shown in a favorable light. Ken Burns tends to "monotone" me to death.
[The New York Times]
September 5, 2003
TV REVIEW | 'DC 9/11'; 'CENTER OF THE WORLD'
Sept. 11, Before and After
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
[A] DOCUDRAMA on a subject as raw as Sept. 11 is not easily watched. When American troops are still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, a look back at the presidential decisions that brought us to this point is all the more sensitive.
But there is absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever to "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." This made-for-television movie on Showtime Sunday night is less a first draft of history than a final rewrite of a Tom Clancy screenplay. George W. Bush, uncannily impersonated by Timothy Bottoms, is its action-adventure commander in chief. "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me," the fictionalized president barks at an overprotective security officer keeping him hidden aboard Air Force One on that fateful day. "I'll just be waiting for the bastard."
Timing, more than anything else, mars this effort to dramatize the events and emotions that guided the president ? and the country ? in the first days after the terrorist attacks; it is way too soon for a serene look back. PBS, which is marking the second anniversary of Sept. 11 on Monday night with "The Center of the World," a very thorough two-part documentary on the rise ? and fall ? of the World Trade Center, has the opposite problem. Two years after the twin towers collapsed, it is a little late to be reliving ? especially at such a slow, stately pace ? the saga of the Rockefellers and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
"DC 9/11" was written by Lionel Chetwynd, a filmmaker who is one of Hollywood's more outspoken conservatives, and it reflects his unstinting admiration for the president. (In his eyes, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is not particularly eloquent, and Vice President Dick Cheney is a kowtowing yes-man.)
All docudramas round out the facts to fit a story line. Few would dispute the basic accuracy of the film: even his most virulent opponents give the president credit for adapting to the unimaginable attack with speed and resolve.
But a movie about George W. Bush's first serious challenge ? broadcast at the beginning of his re-election campaign and in the middle of a murky, costly war with no marked ending ? inevitably lends it a sour, partisan undertone.
"DC 9/11" would like to be the Sept. 11 version of "The Missiles of October," an acclaimed 1974 made-for-TV movie about the Cuban missile crisis that starred William Devane as President John F. Kennedy and Martin Sheen as his brother Robert.
Real life, however, does not always follow the smooth arc of a made-for-television movie. A character can grow in a crisis and still come up short of the next set of obstacles.
"DC 9/11" traces Mr. Bush's transition from new, untested president to committed wartime leader, but along the way it rarely misses a chance to suggest that the Clinton administration's weakness was to blame for the disaster.
"I want to inflict pain," Mr. Bush tells Prime Minister Blair over the telephone. "Bring enough damage so they understand there is a new team here, a fundamental change in our policy."
The script does not air-brush Mr. Bush's first, awkward stumbles, and it faithfully recreates his stiff televised statement from Barksdale Air Force Base. The movie also puts him back on his feet very quickly. On Air Force One, he is totally in control. "Hike military alert status to Delta," he instructs Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld (John Cunningham). "That's the military, the C.I.A., foreign, domestic, everything," he explains to Mr. Rumsfeld, who was also Secretary of Defense under President Gerald R. Ford. "And if you haven't gone to Defcon 3, you oughtta." He then gets on the line with Mr. Cheney (Lawrence Pressman): "Vice? We are at war."
Wives in these kinds of thrillers are either dead or docile. The movie version of Laura Bush (Mary Gordon Murray) is so placid and composed that she seems like the First Lady of Prozac. In real life, after the president told reporters that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," Mrs. Bush famously chided him for his bravado, teasingly asking, "Bushie, you gonna git 'im?" In the movie she merely suggests, ever so softly, that some people might misunderstand his Texan way with words.
There is no misunderstanding anything in Ric Burns's three-hour documentary "The Center of the World." Every fact is corroborated by a well-spoken specialist, and then corroborated again by another. Four different experts make the point that after World War II, David Rockefeller wanted a World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan because Chase Manhattan Bank's headquarters were located there, ranging from the historian Mike Wallace to the historian Kenneth Jackson.
The narration, read by the actor David Ogden Stiers ( "M*A*S*H") in the urgent, punctuated tone of an old-fashioned wartime newsreel, is writerly, perhaps too writerly. (He evokes New York as a city "at once bewilderingly diverse and cosmopolitan ? and yet in many ways, surprisingly insular and inward-looking ? as if the process of globalization had mainly meant gathering in the world's peoples and riches ? without involvement in the world's deep conflicts and divisions.")
This is, after all, a film with a wealth of potent visual images, including film of New Yorkers in 1974 staring up in shock and disbelief at the French artist Philippe Petit as he pranced nimbly across a high wire between the two 110-story towers, and later, crowds staring in shock and disbelief as people threw themselves out the windows of those same burning towers on Sept. 11.
The rise and fall of the World Trade Center is the finale of an eight-part historical saga, "New York: A Documentary Film," that Mr. Burns began in 1999. It provides intelligent insights and incomparable images. Perhaps fittingly, however, it suffers from the same hubris as the power brokers who in the 1970's imposed the World Trade Center on an unwilling public and an unresponsive real-estate market.
"The Center of the World" is too much, too late.
DC 9/11: Time of Crisis
Showtime, Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time
Written by Lionel Chetwynd; directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith; director of photography, Ousama Rawi; edited by John Lafferty; production designer, Bill Fleming; music by Lawrence Shragge; costumes designed by Ruth Secord; executive producer, Robert Halmi Sr.; co-produced by John Vasey; produced by Armand Leo and Mr. Chetwynd. A production of Showtime Networks Inc.
WITH: Timothy Bottoms (George W. Bush), John Cunningham (Donald H. Rumsfeld), David Fonteno (Colin L. Powell), Gregory Itzin (John Ashcroft), Penny Johnson Jerald (Condoleezza Rice), Stephen Macht (Paul Wolfowitz), Mary Gordon Murray (Laura Bush), Lawrence Pressman (Dick Cheney), Gerry Mendicino (George Tenet) and Scott Alan Smith (Ari Fleischer).
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
The Center of the World, Episode 8 of New York: A Documentary Film
On most PBS stations Monday night (check local listings).
Directed by Ric Burns; written by James Sanders and Mr. Burns; narrated by David Ogden Stiers; executive producers, Mr. Burns and Donald Rosenfeld; produced by Marilyn Ness and Mr. Burns; series executive producer, Mark Samels. Produced by Steeplechase Films, in association with WGBH Boston, Thirteen/WNET and the New-York Historical Society.
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