How can you critique a film about tragedy? There's something galling about talking camera angles and directorial choices in films that show real life heartbreak. These difficulties are compounded if the film is a documentary"”you can't spend a hundred words on the acting because there wasn't any. Compounded again if it's a documentary about a tragedy in living memory. Compounded again if you learn that the writer/director is a family member of someone who died that day.
Thankfully, Out of the Clear Blue Sky (which meets all of these criteria) is so well done that I can mostly avoid the awkward situation of having to say something bad about it. The film is moving. It is as raw a treatment of grief as ever there was. And everyone in the country should see it.
The movie takes a fresh look at the tragedy of 9/11 through the lens of Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank housed almost entirely on floors 101-105 of the World Trade Center. On 9/11, that firm suffered the most casualties out of any organization or single grouped body of human beings"”658 workers.
The CEO, Howard Lutnick, was not yet in the office because he was taking his son to school. He became one of a smattering of survivors and faced the incredible challenges of dealing with the loss of his friends"”and brother"”who worked for his company, setting up a crisis center in the first days of the attacks, having to rebuild the company before the stock market opened again, and helping the grieving families of his employees.
The film is an exploration in trust and epistemology"”perception versus reality. How do we know what's real? It's a theme even more relevant to today's media mobs than it was in 2001. In the mad dash to get a few more views, a few more hits, a little bump in ratings, the events of history are crafted into narratives"”with the incentive to interpret facts and events in ways that will easiest and fastest become an archetypal narrative.
And these reported versions of events ripple out across the country, to degrees further and further removed from the original players and events. These events, these incredibly complex products of an intertwining of geography, genetics, destiny, and the interactions of thousands of small choices preceding, travel through gossip at the speed of light and shrink and distort into a headline and lead that someone hundreds of miles and degrees of separation away from the original facts will read and use as a scapegoat, a narrative"”a lie"”that allow him or her to grumble over their coffee and send a few hateful thoughts at someone whose misfortune offers them just one way among a hundred others to ignore the depths of their own banality.
Thus Howard Lutnick, a man with a wolfish reputation on Wall Street, was squished into the "greedy fat cat" trope when he stopped paying his dead employee's paychecks"”a decision taken totally out of context by the media looking for a story.
Out of the Clear Blue Sky is a lesson in business leadership, in dealing with grief, and a poignant reminder of what is truly important in life.
A hand more removed from the events would have included less and decreased the run time a bit. But the repetitive moments are far outweighed by the moments that offer a window into the human condition.
See it! And bring some tissues.
