WTC View

After viewing dozens of features and shorts at 2005's Newfest in New York City, 12 festival days climaxed for me at the screening of WTC View. The story of a gay man living 12 blocks from Ground Zero placing an ad in the Village Voice for a roommate to share his Soho apartment on Sept. 10, 2005, his respondents' and his reactions during the next few weeks plucked a string in this ex-New Yorker's soul that is still resonating as I write this.

Just like that fateful day of November 22, 1963, hardly any of us will forget what we were doing and where we were when we heard of 9/11. I was sitting with a now-deceased friend of mine in my Amsterdam canal house apartment when the phone rang not long after 3 pm Central European Time and a Dutch friend of mine told me to turn on CNN to see something incredible. And indeed, from 3000 miles away the shock and panic pierced me to the core. To relive a group of New Yorkers' own narratives and reactions was both purifying and heart-rending.

The individual stories of the characters in WTC View, each a personal and personalized vignette of how their lives had been changed on that fateful morning, death and survival intertwined, the New Yorker's coping strategy confronted by 'you can run but you can no longer hide', healthy reactions to sick jokes, all make this a film no one should miss.

Kudos especially for director Brian Sloan and actors Michael Urie and Nick Potenzieri as well as the rest of the players who had me laughing and crying from beginning to end.

Although I had moved a few miles north before the World Trade Center was attacked, and I didn't look down the Hudson River and see smoke where the towers used to be until after they'd both fallen, I was deeply shocked, and I grieved for them for at least ten years. It was the most painful experience of my adult life. I didn't know anyone who died there; I was grieving for the buildings, which had been there in the background of my life like an anchor I didn't know was so important until it was gone.

But those wounds finally healed, and seeing this movie now, in 2013, isn't as cathartic for me as it might have been when it first came out eight years ago, when my grief still seemed inconsolable. So for me, now, this is just a movie, and I respond to it as if it were about a subject that never affected me at all.

As a movie, it's better than I expected. Michael Urie and Elizabeth Kapplow are excellent as Eric and Josie, and the rest of the cast are good enough not to be distracting (except for Jeremy Beazlie's horrendous British accent). The direction is surprisingly good, which is unusual when a playwright adapts his own play to the screen and also directs it; that's almost always a formula for failure, but Sloan does it fairly well.

As a play, it's beautifully written, never predictable or trite, and I'm sure it was deeply moving when performed live in a theatre. Unfortunately, the transition to film could have been better. But that's a very hard transition to make, and nobody has EVER done it perfectly except Mike Nichols with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

So although I admired this movie a lot, I never really believed it, never got deeply involved in Eric's trauma, because I could never get past the knowledge that he was acting.

Stage acting and movie acting are very, very different; and this was a play performed for a camera instead of an audience: admirably done, but the stage-bound formality of both the writing and the acting kept me at a distance emotionally.

I saw this movie at ImageOut, the Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival. Although a shallow, good-natured film called "Summer Storm" won the audience award at the end of the week, most of my friends--people who like more complexity and substance in their films--thought this film was the best of the fest. Focusing on a 30ish gay male photographer whose apartment looked upon the World Trade Center and who is now coping with the trauma he suffered on 9/11, this drama with comedy is one of the most warm and deeply felt human dramas I've seen all year. You really learn to care about the photographer, named Eric, and his all-too-human response to overwhelming historical events. The humor comes organically out of the material without seeming inappropriate or ghoulish, and the film really shows us what it's like, in a compelling way, to live in historically significant times. Were this film to have starred bigger stars--say Jake Gyllenhaal as Eric and Claire Danes as his gal-pal friend--it would be talked about as an Oscar contender today. As it is, this little gem of an indie needs searching out. Many of the actors in this film, particularly Michael Urie and Nick Potenzieri, will be stars one day. See them here first, and remember I told you so.

This is SO worth seeing. I was hesitant, thinking it would be a big gloom-fest. But instead, I found myself very moved by a beautifully acted, written and photographed film. It really needs to be seen.

I was surprised to find out that the star, Michael Urie, is the bitchy gay assistant on Ugly Betty. He is such a versatile actor, that it's hard to believe it's the same person. I love the way the director chose to keep some of the staginess from the play. Usually this is not a good thing, but this film uses it to good effect, increasing the intimacy and immediacy of the story and performances.

Congratulations to the talented cast and everyone else involved!

The majority of the reviews state how the film "brought it all back", "the feelings we all had but did not dare talk about", and on the other hand a surprise concerning the actor playing Eric who was a bitchy character in "Ugly Betty". Well, that does not tell me a thing about the film. Was it good, bad, a pretext for the nostalgias? Did it study them?

The premise was good: not showing what lies outside, leaving it all for the last shot, trying to focus, or maybe make it a bit suffocating, yes, that was a good premise. Unfortunately, it is average. And being average in a feature that puts itself in that specific period and these events, wow, it must score! Not this one. The feelings in the end are too respectable, they take themselves too seriously, as if it is a disgrace to be comical, not knowing how wise this is. And the main character does not. See how reportedly lame in the dialogues his jokes are. OK, he may be embarrassed. But so is the film. Even worse, because being embarrassed can be defended by "so were the times", this is unfortunately counteracted by giving interiority to the possible room-mates parading. For they sure have more interiority and humanity than the main character, and this makes me not really care about him. He is too neurotic and self-conscious for any caring dramatic effect, and the direction is too slice-of-life no exit up to the end, to come off as something else than, actually, biased.

I would prefer a slice of the others' lives. They seemed more alive, and, at some points, giving their time to Eric's "ranting", as his friend repeatedly said, was little more than pandering.