Tension builds ahead of Sept. 11
The drumbeat leading up to 9/11 is the subject of the crisply engaging Hulu thriller, “The Looming Tower,” premiering on Wednesday, Feb. 28. What makes it engaging isn’t the turgid bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and the FBI in the days before and after the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa, but, rather, our knowledge of what will happen in New York, Pennsylvania and Arlington, Va., three years hence.
The 10-episode series, created by Dan Futterman and Alex Gibney and based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Lawrence Wright, manages to find drama in the the bureaucracy of the executive branch of the federal government as those in charge of domestic security battle for control over those in charge of foreign affairs. The enmity is palpable between FBI Special Agent John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels) and Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), a bloodless,
arrogant CIA analyst. The two men play a game of highstakes one-upmanship to exert influence on Richard Clarke (Michael Stuhlbarg), counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration.
The action is set in motion by the discovery of a hard drive containing a list of al Qaeda operatives and 50 potential targets of terrorist attack. The CIA gets its hands on the info and doesn’t share it with the FBI, which sparks wrath and outrage in O’Neill. At every turn, O’Neill finds himself spending as much energy fighting with the CIA to share information as he does actually trying to thwart terrorist attacks.
The old saying about how it’s never a good idea to watch the sausage being made applies to government as well, it seems. As the infighting continues, “Mistakes Were Made,” to cite the title of the series’ third episode. We can’t help wondering how many of those mistakes could have been avoided if the U.S. response to the growing influence of al Qaeda had been better coordinated. But war is waged not by departments, but by human beings, who are, by definition, flawed. O’Neill does not wage internal war against Schmidt and CIA Director George Tenet (Alec Baldwin) for bragging rights alone, but because he realizes that the absence of clearheaded decision making, including informed contributions from various departments, is needed if the country is going to be able to counter Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Schmidt, on the other hand, is driven by ego and self-righteousness, closing his mind to the possibility that someone else may have a better idea for combatting terrorism than he does. We hear him tell a congressional committee that he has no concerns about the collateral damage of attacks he ordered because he does not consider himself “a citizen of the world.”
As we watch the events of 1998 unfolding against the almost surreal backdrop of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, we are inevitably prompted to consider issues of morality. The nation is transfixed by a stain on a blue dress, while, within the airless halls of government, men and women are treating life-and-death decisions, decisions that we know, down the road, will result in mass casualties, as a kind of perverse game of keep-away.
The show’s screenwriters, including Futterman and playwright Adam Rapp, work hard to interweave what is happening in East Africa, among the terrorists, with the buttoned-up world of American politics. It’s not quite enough to make “The Looming Tower” a nail-biter, but fortunately, the series is graced with one superb performance after another.
First, of course, there is Jeff Daniels, who continues to confirm his status as one of our most gifted and versatile actors. Sarsgaard is every bit his equal as the robotic, amoral CIA analyst. At every turn, Schmidt seethes with his own self-importance, and Sarsgaard keeps the character wound up like a time bomb. Bill Camp, Tahar Rahim, Stuhlbarg and Tawfeek Barhom, as a terrorist on the run, also contribute mightily to the series’ success.
The three episodes made available to critics are masterful and smart in how they use our knowledge of what happened on 9/11 to supply retroactive suspense to the events of the late 1990s. That may be more challenging to maintain over the remaining seven episodes, but even if the the construct falls short, the series still has a core of complex, morally various characters, brilliantly embodied by Daniels and others, to hold our attention.