United 93 and the cowardly German

The other day I finally saw Paul Greengrass’s United 93, the story of the passenegers who attacked the 9/11 hijackers in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. (Sixteen months after it came out, I know, but hey, whatever you people come here for, it isn’t timeliness, is it?) I found the picture amazing: beautifully shot, gripping & harrowing, sensitive but not sentimental, sad & moving, etc. etc. Yep, it’s one of those movies that compels you to just throw adjectives at it.

But one thing really, really bothered me.

In the movie, several passengers spearhead the revolt against the hijackers: Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw. This is all based on the public record, of course, as derived from cellphone calls made from within the plane before it crashed. The movie presents most of the other passengers as more passive participants or observers.

But one person in the film, a man with a clear German accent, repeatedly counsels the other passengers to co-operate with the hijackers instead of resisting. At one point, as the passengers are preparing to attack, the German panics and appears to try and warn the hijackers, before the Americans subdue him.

This was startling in the context of the movie, but the filmmakers had made so much public noise about their fidelity to what we know of the day’s events, and their sensitivity to the victims and their families, that I just assumed there must have been some factual basis for these scenes.

Nope.

There was indeed a German passenger on flight 93, Christian Adams, but there’s no indication whatsoever that he tried to undermine the passenger revolt.

I’m sorry, but WTF? This is gross and offensive on many levels.

I supose you could argue that it’s highly unlikely that all passengers were, ahem, on board with the plan to rise up and retake the plane. So dramatically, it would make sense to have one or more of them behaving as the Adams character did. But why would Paul Greengrass et al pick the flight’s only German to be their token coward?

There are really only two likely possibilities:

1. It’s an attempt at some kind of political resonance, using the German to subtly make the point that unlike the U.S., Europe has been lamentably slow to grasp the geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 age.

2. It’s simply safer. The film was made for an American audience, so if you’re going to suggest that one of the passengers was in fact less than heroic, make him one of the furriners.

Either of those rationales is pretty disgusting. Even more so when you consider that if the movie’s token coward had been one of the Americans, at least his indentity could have been slightly more “hidden.” But by making him instantly recognizable as Adams, Greengrass has completely smeared an actual person, with no basis for doing so. And this from a filmmaker who marched up and down for months proclaiming that the victims’ memories and their families were his primary concern. He didn’t specifically say the American victims, but I guess we now know that’s what he meant.

I gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I can’t think of another case where such a relatively little thing has so completely soured an otherwise amazing film for me.