At least another year will pass before Hollywood, notoriously wary of films based on "current events," is ready to face the trauma of 9/11 head-on. Universal Pictures is developing a script about the last two Port Authority officers pulled from the World Trade Center rubble, and Columbia Pictures only recently acquired rights to 102 Minutes, a book about the terrorist attacks by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, reporters for the New York Times.
Certainly, Spike Lee's 25th Hour, a crime story released by Touchstone in 2002, acknowledged the attacks with scenes set in the barren landscape of ground zero. (And the Tribeca Film Festival has announced plans to show The Great New Wonderful, an independently financed black comedy from the Dude Where's My Car? director, Danny Leiner, set in post-9/11 New York.)
But that day's real impact on cinema has quietly arrived, written small in a series of new pictures that have no political content but that are suffused with a deep, enduring sense of grief born in the attack's wake.
Sudden loss has ever been the stuff of movies; but the American take on the subject has tended toward tales of healing and inspiration. Thus, Ordinary People 25 years ago preached therapeutic breakthrough after a young man's drowning, much as Julia Roberts' radiant Shelby brought her family closer by her untimely demise in Steel Magnolias a decade later.
In the much darker season at hand, however, death has recovered its sting. The Robert De Niro thriller Hide and Seek dramatizes a child's near catatonic withdrawal after her mother's suicide, though the mournful premise gives way to a gimmicky horror plot. Another recent movie, Fear X, is a more haunting psychological thriller about a distraught security guard (John Turturro) grieving for his wife, who was killed in a mysterious shooting.
Winter Solstice, opening next month, is a subtle drama about a widower, played by Anthony LaPaglia, and his two sons, whose lives have been thrown into disarray by the accidental death of his wife. In Bereft, which was shown on the film festival circuit last fall, a photographer, played by Vinessa Shaw, has been unable to absorb the death of her husband; she remains in a state of paralysis.
Imaginary Heroes, which opened recently in the US, begins with the suicide of a teenage swimming star and details the sometimes bizarre reactions of his parents (Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels) and younger brother (Emile Hirsch). And in The Upside of Anger, which opened this weekend, Joan Allen surrenders to outbursts of anger and drunken despair after her husband disappears and leaves her to raise four daughters on her own.
Healing figures in some of these new movies, but it is a minor part of the story; most of the films survey characters who remain stuck in a syndrome of grief and anger that overpowers them for months or even years after the traumatic event. They convey a profound sadness that in some cases has more than subliminal connection to the post-9/11 mood in which the pictures, with their typically long lead times, took shape.
"You'll notice if you look closely at the film, American flags are on every house," Tim Daly, co-director of Bereft, said of his movie. "In a subtle way, this reminds you of the black armband on people's psyches since Sept. 11."
Tellingly, the characters in this somber wave are shattered by a sudden, violent event rather than a family member's death after a long illness. "I'm not a therapist," said Josh Sternfeld, the writer-director of Winter Solstice, "but I would think that the very sudden loss of a person to a random act immediately throws the survivors into a whole new plane of consciousness. Instinctively I wanted the death in my film to be a violent accident."
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