Patriots Day
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jax156
ISSN1945-2314
Autores ResumoThe prophecies about Hollywood in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks were wrong, of course, and seemed so even at the time. The idea that the scale of the disaster would invalidate the action-movie conventions that had proven so popular with audiences and would inhibit filmmakers from using acts of terrorism as a premise for movie thrillers was more hope than reality. In short order, Hollywood was back to business as usual, with an odd caveat. The studios remained averse to producing challenging, serious depictions of 9/11 and other real-world terrorist events but embraced the trope of terrorism in thrillers and adventure films. To date, only two big-screen dramas have depicted the 9/11 attacks—Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006)—while hundreds of Die Hard–style thrillers (the original was released in 1988) have proliferated. In this context, Patriots Day is an anomaly in that it portrays the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent hunt for the bombers by law enforcement. The director Peter Berg re-creates the bombing along Boylston Street and the rapidly unfolding events that followed, which included the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) policeman, a carjacking, and a gun battle with police in nearby Watertown by the two bombers, who were intent on escaping the Boston metropolitan area. Berg studied the news footage of the bombing and its now-iconic images and examined the timeline of events; he aimed to model the film's narrative around these factual sources. Characters in the film carry the names of their real-world counterparts. In these ways the movie makes a claim to authenticity, to being factual in its re-creation of events—a filmmaking stance that carries some risk. Depicting actual events in which people lost their lives can be a walk through an emotional minefield for a filmmaker, whereas staying within the realm of fiction often proves far safer. When feelings about a tragedy remain raw among the public, people take a proprietary interest in the subject and care deeply about how a filmmaker approaches the topic. The film, for example, shows that an eight-year-old boy was killed in the bombing—we see his cloth-covered body—but the filmmakers cannot name the victim because his parents refused to participate in the production. This is one reason that terrorists in movies over-populate fictional worlds but can scarcely be found in reality-based films made for the big screen. Documentary filmmakers generally escape the suspicion that descends upon those pursuing dramatic re-creations. Audiences understand why events such as 9/11 inspire documentaries—such films offer a form of witnessing, a means of stating that the attacks and other comparable events are important in collective terms. Docudramas, by contrast, court suspicion. What is their purpose? Why are they needed when news, candid footage, and documentary films are readily available? It was inevitable, then, that the truth claims of Patriots Day would be closely parsed by those with geographic, emotional, or other connections to the events it depicts. And, indeed, while the film was mostly praised by national reviewers, Boston-based critics took a harsher view of its merits and its deviations from the factual record.
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