Still in Massachusetts. . . visited my sister and brother-in-law up in Haverhill, then went to see "United 93" with my mother. . . According to Frank Rich in today's Times, the film "reduces the doomed and brave Americans on board to nameless stick figures with less personality than the passengers in 'Airport.' Rather than deepening our knowledge of them or their heroism, the movie caps an hour of air-traffic controller nail-biting with a tasteful re-enactment of the grisly end."

I beg to differ. The movie refuses to pander to the Hollywood convention of selecting and focusing on a single "hero" (someone, possibly played by, say, Bruce Willis, who rises up and calls out "There's more of us than them. Let's get 'em, guys!") and following his (or her) story at the expense of all of the others, the movie takes the wide view and lets the scenes play before the camera, while not picking and choosing what the director thinks might entertain us while ignoring what he thinks isn't essential for moving the story along.

As David Denby notes in The New Yorker, "there's no visual or verbal rhetoric, no swelling awareness of the Menace We All Face. . . In a story of collective and anonymous heroism, we don't want Denzel Washington leading the charge or Gene Hackman wrathfully telling the military to get on the stick . . .This is true existential filmmaking: there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do? Many films whip up tension with cunning and manipulation. As far as possible, this movie plays it straight."

I found the fast editing, the documentary-style hand-held camera shots, and the accumulated sense of dread to be as suspenseful and thrilling (and downright scary) as anything I've seen in film in a while. And most importantly, the movie doesn't demonize the hijackers, nor go out of its way to try and sympathize with them. Instead, it shows them, like the doomed passengers, the air-traffic controllers and the military, to be ordinary men in unusual circumstances - we see their fear, their worry, their concern, we hear one say "I love you" to someone over a telephone, we see the comfort they take in their faith, and we see the beastliness of their reprehensible actions. The camera doesn't flinch (nor does it show graphic bloodshed). Instead, it presents the events as best the filmmaker can reconstruct it, and lets the viewers draw their own conclusion.

I got an email today informing me that an old friend and long-former co-worker died over the weekend from a heart attack. This whole weekend has been a long meditation on our impermanence - my father, the doomed passengers, my friend. . . myself.

Life and death is the great matter. Impermanence is swift. There is only the next moment, and the one after that - what, then, are you going to do?