The reviews keep rolling in for “The Path To 911” and, at this point, perhaps the most favorable ones will come on Monday on Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s shows.
Certainly not from some of the nation’s leading critics. We’ve highlighted some of them here — but the one from the Washington Post‘s Tom Shales nails the reason why so many people are objecting to it: he says it is a political hatchet-job:
Factually shaky, politically inflammatory and photographically a mess, “The Path to 9/11” — ABC’s two-part, five-hour miniseries tracing events leading up to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — has something not just to offend everyone but also to depress them.
The docudrama — allegedly produced as a warning to the United States that the attacks, or something like them, could happen again — falls clumsily into traps that await all those who make fictional films claiming to be factual. Except this time, the event being dramatized is one of the most tragic and monstrous in the nation’s history, not something to be trifled with.
It is hardly surprising that the movie has been preceded by cries of outrage from some of those depicted in it, especially members of the Clinton administration who are shown as, essentially, incompetent.
And, of course, no other administration in recent memory has been considered to be that. MORE:
Blunderingly, ABC executives cast doubt on their own film’s veracity when they made advance copies available to such political conservatives as Rush Limbaugh but not to Democrats who reportedly requested the same treatment.
We’ve noted repeatedly that this action — or nonaction — was the final nail in this project’s coffin as being defended as anything but a film that in reality is more of a 2006 mid-term campaign commercial shown for four hours on a major network versus a docudrama — even using the loose standards of recent docudramas. AND:
If it’s any consolation to Democrats, however, the film at no point suggests that Saddam Hussein — whom President Bush has tried to associate with the 9/11 attacks — was involved in the planning or execution of the attacks in any way….
Maybe that’ll be in the series’ sequel.
Clinton himself is libeled through abusive editing. A first-class U.S. operative played by Donnie Wahlberg argues the case for getting bin Laden while the al-Qaeda leader is openly in view in some sort of compound in Afghanistan. CIA officials haggle over minor details, such as the budget for the operation. The film’s director, David L. Cunningham, then cuts abruptly to a TV image of Clinton making his infamous “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” remark with regard to Monica Lewinsky. The impression given is that Clinton was spending time on his sex life while terrorists were gaining ground and planning a nightmare.
It would have made as much sense, and perhaps more, to cut instead to stock footage of a smirking Kenneth Starr, the reckless Republican prosecutor largely responsible for distracting not just the president but the entire nation with the scandal.
Looking even worse than Clinton is then-U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara K. Bodine. Her name is not prominently featured but her title is, and she comes across as a foolishly intransigent official who defends the bin Laden name and insults FBI agents who visit her office, with O’Neill heading up the delegation. Patricia Heaton, who plays the role, makes Bodine seem especially despicable, a close-minded ignoramus who ironically tells O’Neill, “You are the epitome of ‘the Ugly American.'”
Shales gives the film poor marks on technical grounds. But he’s not done yet examining a film that takes a story of administrations of BOTH parties failing to act adequately on terrorism and turns it into a Good Guy/Bad Guy story — where the real bad guys are members of a government who had a “D” in front of their party affiliation (on the eve of a hotly-contested mid-term election).
But aesthetic objections pale in comparison to the legitimate complaints of those who resent the film’s being passed off as truth when it apparently is riddled with errors. These are dismissed in a glib disclaimer acknowledging “composite and representative characters and time compression . . . for dramatic purposes.” How much drama needs to be added to 9/11?
The film is prominently billed as being based on the report of the 9/11 commission, but one must read the fine print: Also acknowledged, although far less conspicuously in the credits, are three books on the subject.
In a report on “NBC Nightly News” on Thursday, unnamed Clinton administration officials were quoted as saying that some scenes in the film are “pure fiction.” Pure fiction doesn’t mix well with fact. Executive producer Marc Platt’s quoted defense: It was “not our intention to distort.” Whatever the intention — and Democrats have a right to be suspicious of any product of the conservative-minded Walt Disney Co., which produced the film and owns ABC — distortion unfortunately seems to have been the outcome.
“The Path to 9/11” appears intent on meting out punishment, not only to some of those portrayed in it but also to viewers who try to make it through the whole grueling assault — an assault on the senses that may also be an assault on the truth.
As we’ve noted here, the true casualties are going to be some corporate images that took years to develop…even if the film nets a huge audience due to all the brou-ha-ha and plugging of it by conservative talk-show hosts.
Were some of the corporate bigwigs who gave up weekends, worked overtime, got loans, and put their guts into developing these companies conservative? Most assuredly yes, but that’s not the point. Because they were of a DIFFERENT ERA with a DIFFERENT SENSE of duty — a duty they felt towards broadening their companies’ audiences and fostering NATIONAL UNITY.
The past corporate giants who built the companies under fire made sure that most of what they offered the country (and world) as entertainment had UNIFYING values and themes that were not basically the disputed debating — and campaign attack — points of just ONE political party…during an election year..
Whoever green-lighted this project and unleashed this controversy that has been so poorly handled must have been goofy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.