Sept. 11 assessed, 20 years later, in documentaries
Three 9/11 specials range from facile to great and grave
On the uncertain timeline we’re facing now — the pandemic, its variants and enablers, nearly 650,000 fatalities in America alone since early 2020 — the awful suddenness of the nearly 3,000 lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, occupies a separate, brutal place in our recent tragic events.
How much 9/11 reassessment can we handle, as a viewing nation, at this moment? Going by how much is currently looking for an audience, a tremendous amount.
Watching three of the Sept. 11 20th anniversary specials widely available, ranging from a facile, 90-minute one-off on Apple TV+ to a fine, spacious, six-part limited series from National Geographic, streaming on Hulu, the easiest thing you can say is that 9/11 documentaries are nobody’s idea of binge escapism. Not easy. They shouldn’t be.
If a Sept. 11 documentary project leaves you foremost with warm feelings about American grit and resilience, I’m not sure that project is telling the right array of stories.
The great, grave strength of “9/11: One Day in America,” National Geographic’s special now on Hulu, lies in its unhyped patience. It follows a number of individual subjects whose lives intersected with that bright, cloudless and then terrible morning. Series director Daniel Bogado made “One Day in America” with the conspicuous collaboration of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. So often in documentary filmmaking, that degree of cooperation with folks closest to the source
can lead to compromises, or worse.
Here, it works. The key interview subjects, survivors of that day, remain haunted by what they lived through. Eighteen or 19 years later, depending on when Bogado filmed them, the firefighters, World Trade Center commuters, news personalities and others present that morning talk about it with remarkable perspective — anguish, plus distance, spoken to the camera.
So many compelling portraits are accommodated here. Emergency medical specialist Ernest Armstead’s “black tag” incident, as he sorts the injured and dead for triage; North Tower worker Stanley Praimnath’s life-or-death decision whether to try an elevator or take the stairs after the plane hits; Daphne Carlisle’s 82nd floor story, as one of the very last to come out of Tower One alive; the accounts are riveting, and never rushed.
Many interviewed in “9/11: One Day in America”
experienced similar “threshold” moments after the tower collapses, amid the dust and chemical fog and eerie quiet. “Having no experience being dead,” says firefighter Mickey Kross, “you don’t know what it’s like. So I thought I could possibly be dead.” He lived to tell the tale, and without ignoring all the lives lost, “One Day in America” honors the survivors by listening to them, word by word.
Over on HBO, Spike Lee’s “New York City Epicenters 9/11 -> 2021 ½” offers the opposite of “One Day in America” in style, attack and breathless variety of topics. The approach here is determinedly wide angle rather than deep focus. Lee takes a special interest (it’s the best stuff in the fourpart “documentary essay”) in how first responders, working through the rubble after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, knowingly took risks regarding air quality deemed at the time to be relatively safe. It was not.
Several subjects, notably
New York Fire Department battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer, are featured in both the National Geographic and HBO specials. “NYC Epicenters” races through as much as director Lee can handle in a hurry, canvassing 20 years of major crises hitting New Yorkers where they live, from 9/11 to now-former Gov. Cuomo’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic.
The fourth installment is the best: It’s the one where 9/11 conspiracy theorists, in an earlier cut of the project, were originally given a bizarre amount of credence before hitting the cuttingroom floor. Certainly “Epicenters” is better off without the speculative “inside job” hogwash.
Lee talks off-camera to nurses, morgue directors and 9/11 survivors or family members of those killed on Sept. 11. I’m not sure the 9/11 material benefits from all the chortling Yankees/Knicks sports talk. (There are plenty of “oh, that Spike!” bits.) Shoehorning everything from the Central Park birder who got Karened to the Black Lives Matter protests into one loose framework, “NYC Epicenters” goes everywhere at once, without much of a sense of direction. Yet the erratic, hit-and-run quality of the filmmaking captures the fractious energy of both the filmmaker and the city he calls home.
In contrast, “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” is sleekly anonymous in terms of documentary perspective, or lack thereof. Director Adam Wishart has a clear sense of direction and purpose: He’s trying to make then-President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other key members of the Sept. 11 administration look as resolute and superheroic as possible.
Wishart enjoyed full access to key Bush administration players and their memories of how Sept. 11 began with Bush in Sarasota, Florida, in a classroom visit. “Inside the President’s War Room” splits its narratives in two, with Bush aboard Air Force One for eight testy hours, working off faulty intel (initial reports had al-Qaida coming for the presidential jet next), while Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hunkered down in D.C.
In new if not especially illuminating interview footage, Cheney recalls his first conversation with Bush after Bush boarded Air Force One. It’s essentially a marketing matter. “Are we going to describe it as a terrorist attack?” Cheney recalls as Topic A. Cheney liked that option, Bush agreed, and that, Cheney says, “set the stage” for the rest of the Bush years and the next 20 years of American foreign policy.
The Bush interview footage reveals all the tics and conversational trademarks we know from his eight years in office: the nervous grin, the blinking, the Texas-trained swagger (top of his “to-do list” that morning, he says, was “to kick their ass”). There are some choice details and intriguing questions of problem-solving under extreme duress. But too often in this doc, narrated with more nuance by Jeff Daniels than it deserves, we’re getting less of a multilayered chronicle of crisis management, and more of a facile example of image maintenance. Sept. 11 needs more, whatever the story. ‘9/11: One Day in America’ streaming on Hulu.
‘9/11: Inside the President’s War Room’ is streaming on Apple TV+.
‘NYC Epicenters 9/11>2021 ½’ is streaming on HBO. is