Review: 9/11: Press for Truth

Al Franken: God Spoke may or may not give Ann Coulter a headache, but 9/11: Press for Truth will give her a fucking migraine.

9/11: Press for Truth
Photo: The Disinformation Company

Al Franken: God Spoke may or may not give Ann Coulter a headache, but 9/11: Press for Truth will give her a fucking migraine. Ray Nowosielski’s film begins as a portrait of the Jersey Girls, a group of four 9/11 widows—Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, and Mindy Kleinberg—instrumental in drumming up support from both sides of the political aisle for what would eventually become the 9/11 Commission. Despite Coulter’s vulgar accusations that these bipartisan women enjoyed the deaths of their husbands, it’s clear that that the only satisfaction these obviously pained women seek is an acknowledgement of blame from our government for insufficiently acting on its pre-9/11 intelligence. With the help of Paul Thompson, author of the comprehensive The Terror Timeline, and an arsenal of media footage at his disposal, Nowosielski catalogs frustration after frustration, effortlessly illuminating that 9/11 was more than just a “failure of imagination.” But the title of the film refers not only to the Jersey Girls’s vigilant demand for truth but to the media’s own refusal to push for truth after 9/11 for fear of retribution from higher powers. This is where the film reveals its complexity, except Nowosielski makes the mistake of indulging trite scare-mongering tactics, from his use of scary-movie music on the soundtrack to frequent cutaways to a CGI wall of television sets ostensibly meant to evoke the media’s Orwellian control of our (dis)information. These lapses make a smart documentary appear awfully unbecoming.

Score: 
 Director: Ray Nowosielski  Screenwriter: Kyle F. Hence, Ray Nowosielski  Distributor: The Disinformation Company  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2006  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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