Reign over me

How does a film about 9/11 get made? Aside from depicting the idealized heroics of Flight 93, a catharsis which may be based on nothing more than wishful thinking and projection, how does a serious film handle September 11th?

Reign over me is a very good way of doing it.

Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) is a successful (read wealthy) Park Avenue dentist whose cosmetic dentistry practice is a gold mine that leaves him spiritually as empty as materially wealthy. One day he sees Charlie Fineman, his dental school roommate, on a New York, a Manhattan, street. Unable to get his attention, Johnson obsesses it over the missed opportunity to reconnect with his old college buddy, whom, he (and his daughter) knows, lost his family on one of the flights hijacked on September 11th and used as a weapon of destruction, to crash into a building a commit mass murder.

Finally he makes the connection, only to find Charlie nearly catatonic, off in a world where he listens to The Who's Quadrophenia and Springsteen's The River.

I mean, just look at that young face. And there was a scene when Charlie is holding the LP (one of his obsessions are LPs; the vinyl, the smell of the discs).

Charlie does not want to think about his family, about having lost them, in order to stave off the pain of thinking of them. As a result, he is a suppressed volcano largely oblivious to all around him. Largely. If any word is voiced about his loss, he erupts.

Johnson reaches out of the confines of his practice, his family, his wealth, and uses reconnecting with his old roomie as a way to break free of the prison that are his confines. Along the way he helps his old roomie, and himself.

Far from a perfect film, it is nonetheless an admirable attempt to speak about the human cost of 9/11 to the survivors.

Having accepted that touching his scars is a good thing, Charlie Fineman does so, and only moments later is in the throes of a trauma so deep and so hurtful he feels a need to immediately choke it off. How to do so? He drinks a bottle of wine, grabs his gun, and goes out looking to commit suicide. His way of doing so is to force a confrontation in front of two cops, drawing his gun, and, in effect, forcing the uniformed officers to shoot him.

They do not. This film is not about taking the easy way out: it confronts a very sensitive topic, and handles it deftly, humanely, admirably. In the end the film melts away with a cliche, because endings are always touch, even in the most innocuous of films. But before ending, it does an admirable job of dramatizing a powerful human dilemma. It touched me, deeply. The acting is wonderful. Adam Sandler is not usually a favorite of mine, but in this film he shines. Don Cheadle does his usual stellar work. Wonderful film.