WHILE some viewers will no doubt be glued to their TV sets this Sunday for the much-ballyhooed CBS documentary “9/11,” others might wonder what can be gained by viewing a new trove of videotape shot around the World Trade Center on that awful day.
The answer is: not all that much.
It’s true that the two French filmmakers – brothers Gedeon and Jules Naudet, who were in the midst of filming a much milder documentary about a downtown firehouse when the planes hit the Twin Towers – captured videotape that no one else was in position to shoot that day. It includes harrowing footage of firemen escaping from the lobby of the north tower as the south tower collapsed.
The brothers’ close-up access to the firefighters is one of the chief selling points of this documentary, and nobody doubts their courage as they continued filming in the midst of chaos.
But it doesn’t take a new documentary to drive home the point that our firefighters acquitted themselves with extreme bravery on that day. We’ve known this for six months.
If there’s anything new and different about the Naudet brothers’ approach to telling their story, it’s in their focus on a single firehouse – Ladder 1, Engine 7, nicknamed the Lucky 7 because all of its members came back from the catastrophe alive.
It would take a real Scrooge to denigrate this documentary or its creators, who imbue the story of their characters – the firefighters – with real sincerity and emotion.
Some viewers will cry along with the firefighters as they are reunited with the brothers they were afraid they’d lost.
Other viewers, however, will cringe at the way the documentarians match some of their footage with dramatic music in the manner of a Hollywood movie.
And Robert De Niro’s leaden commentary, seemingly read from off-screen cue cards, adds nothing to the proceedings. His scripted words cannot compare to the raw spontaneity of the surviving firefighters as they recall that day.
The language, in fact, is raw indeed.
Four-letter words almost never heard on network television will be heard frequently Sunday. While the language will render “9/11” off-limits for many families with younger children, the network and the filmmakers deserve credit for striving for authenticity.