Parallel Lines

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The fifth anniversary of 9/11 brought with it a flurry of 9/11 themed documentaries on DVD, nearly all of which have seem to have wound up in my mailbox for review over the past few months. Indeed, the 9/11 documentary has become a distinct subgenre, creating its own set of generic expectations, most of which involve liberal tomato-lobbing at the Bush administration over a host of familiar charges. Clips of Bush speaking (or, if you prefer, "Bush lying" or "Bush sounding like a buffoon") are the primary currency of the genre, along with appearances by a recurring cast of talking head characters (we´re ready for your close-up, Mr. Vidal.)

Some of these documentaries are exemplary; far more so are mediocre. Almost all of them begin to blend together when you watch several per month on a long-term basis. The oft-repeated images become stale and lose their power. Not so with Nina Davenport´s remarkable "Parallel Lines," a film which is indisputably about 9/11 (among many other subjects), yet shares little else in common with its genre counterparts.

On September 11, 2001, Nina Davenport was a long way from her New York apartment, in San Diego, to be precise, on a freelance assignment. Two months later, Davenport´s job ended, and it was time to return to New York for the first time since the terrorist attack. She turned this daunting prospect into an opportunity, packing herself and her camera into a car, and hitting the road, with only a vague idea about talking to the people she met along the way, and asking them how 9/11 had affected them. What (and who) she finds along the way makes for one of the most absorbing travelogues the American cinema has produced in years.

Davenport´s sensibilities are made clear in an early encounter with General Bob. General Bob is a toothless old man passing his days in a tiny California desert town. He is also the chief of military intelligence, and runs the war in Afghanistan. Or so he claims without a hint of irony or equivocation. General Bob could easily be played as comic relief, or even as a quaint little eccentric for the audience to condescend to sympathetically. But Davenport´s camera doesn´t waver (well, I think it shakes a little when the General gets most animated) and she offers no inflection on the scene. General Bob is given his chance to speak his mind with dignity. It is this patience and generosity of spirit that makes Davenport´s film so special.

Both patience and generosity are sorely tested in a later encounter with two segregationists in Alabama. One man explains: "Oh, I have black friends, but you just can´t trust any of them." Davenport resists the blue-state urge to run and hide, and keeps her camera running. No, she does not make them "look good" – such a thing would be impossible – but she lets them say what they want to, and add their voices to the chorus that makes up this quintessentially American documentary.

"Parallel Lines" is unlike any other 9/11 documentary I have seen, but it does remind me very much of the films of Ross McElwee. According to Davenport, this really stems from the tradition of the personal documentary as taught at Harvard (where she attended, and where McElwee teaches). Yet while Davenport makes herself a character in the film, she evinces no undue narcissism, and readily takes a back seat to the people she meets along the way, only occasionally re-injecting herself to reinforce the film´s basic spine: a New Yorker´s journey back home. Perhaps most remarkable of all, this is one of the few movies that can be said to be genuinely made by a single filmmaker. Davenport was all alone on her six-week tour, and shot, recorded and edited the film herself.

The people Davenport meets during her six-week cross-country drive are both colorful and memorable: a one-eyed cowboy named Rooster, Lee Shanks who is just "workin´ for the Spirit," a philosophical park ranger, a beekeeper who served in WW2, and many others. She is either blessed with great fortune or, more likely, with the ability to bring out the best in her subjects, as well as the sense never to turn these "colorful" characters into freaks in a menagerie. "Parallel Lines" is also a reminder of the seemingly irresistible confessional power the camera exerts on many people. Though she hardly knows any of her subjects, they are quick to discuss some of their most personal and painful feelings.

And most of the conversations are pretty painful, or at least poignant. 9/11 may be the nation´s great trauma of recent years, but Davenport discovers a country almost entirely composed of smaller, more personal traumas. Furthermore, just about everyone she encounters along the way is a loner or has recently lost someone, a potent challenge to the myth of the happy nuclear American family. We are a nation of the walking wounded; we always have been, and it doesn´t have much to do with any terrorist attack. As one man in Ohio observes, he lost his father a month before 9/11, and that hurt a whole hell of a lot more to him than the towers coming down in New York.

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