Remarkable ‘Memoriam’ Defines Sept. 11

In a month when television is loaded with nostalgia, here’s an encore that won’t remind anyone of “Laverne & Shirley.”

HBO will recognize Memorial Day on Sunday with a remarkable film about New York that embraces the entire nation. If ever one documentary earned space in a time capsule to capture an agonizing moment in U.S. life, this defining work is it.

It’s a clear, intimate window to Sept. 11 and its aftermath, from horror expressed by pedestrians as the World Trade Center’s twin towers take lethal hits from hijacked jets and then collapse, to the hour’s closing lump in the throat with Irving Berlin asking God to bless America.

Such retrospectives are arriving in swarms, of course, along with warnings of terrorists possibly targeting other Big Apple landmarks. “In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01” rises from that blur. It’s impassioned, heartbreaking and honest. It’s everything a remembrance of the devastating terrorist attack should be, in fact, while calling back for a bow someone who awoke that Tuesday as a controversial lame duck mayor, about to be flushed from office by term limits, and went to bed as St. Rudy.

However often this terrible history is rerun--with mention of that day’s satellite terrorist violence near the Pentagon and aboard a jet that crashed in Pennsylvania--the hurt never abates. It resurfaces here in a film that is short but shattering, gingerly walking a high wire of emotion without toppling into gratuitous gore or maudlin exploitation, despite being massaged by aching music from great American composers.

Its views of this calamity are citywide. They come from Brooklyn Heights and Long Island. They come from Albany Street, from West Street, from John Street, from Desbrosses Street, from Park Row, from Grand Street. And from Hizzoner himself.

There is no narrator. Yet former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is heard frequently in a voice-over (“I was told that apparently a plane had hit”) and seen in news footage ever on the move through cratered ruins that day, an urban phoenix symbolizing his city’s immortality.

“We shouldn’t go there,” an aide warns through a dust mask at one point in the mayor’s tour of death and rubble. Maskless and ever impulsive, Giuliani is swiftly off in another direction: “All right, let’s go north then.”

It’s no wonder thank-yous would soon come at Giuliani like debris blown from the twin towers. If you’ve forgotten why, this film from Brad Grey Pictures provides a sense of his inspirational magic.

On the screen are New Yorkers around a car radio beaming Giuliani’s calming words of assurance and encouragement as enormous columns of smoke rise from the depleted skyline behind them.

Here, also, is the mayor at a news conference, saying, “We’re stronger than those barbarians.” It’s a message he’ll repeat again and again with conviction and authority in restrained plainspeak that lifts him far above the rest of officialdom.

Epic events sometimes yield unlikely giants. This was the same Giuliani, after all, whom many had found so terminally abrasive that even being diagnosed with cancer could not soften his image. He was the same mayor who enraged free-expression advocates with his autocratic rage against the Brooklyn Museum of Art painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung attached. The same one who announced to his wife in a news conference that he was leaving her for another woman. The same one who moved in with an openly gay male couple after his wife booted him from Gracie Mansion.

It was only while leading New Yorkers through the wilderness of 9/11 and the ensuing anthrax scare that Giuliani became Moses, piling up more praise than God did for parting the Red Sea.

It’s a story he now recounts in media victory laps like this one (“I realized that I was in some kind of awful, horrific human experience ...”) and in speeches at a reported $100,000 a pop, as his celebrity becomes its own skyscraper of steel and concrete. “His only appearance in the Southland!” trumpeted a radio ad for his recent Kodak Theatre address here, as if announcing a superstar.

Which he is, thanks to 9/11, ironically.

On the slab, as well, are a pair of planned Giuliani movies, one by NBC and another by USA, with TV Guide reporting the likes of James Woods, Stanley Tucci, Anthony LaPaglia and John Turturro being eyed as possible small-screen Rudys.

Never one to sever himself from publicity, Giuliani could not be pried from this towering billboard.

Haunting the film even more than him, though, are other faces and voices, including the mayor’s executive assistant, Beth Petrone, whose husband, fire Capt. Terry Patton, died on the job that day. “When I saw the building come down, I knew he had no chance,” her moving testimony begins.

Panic and pandemonium are here at ground level. “Oh, my God” is heard again and again from ordinary New Yorkers. Their stunned responses on the street were captured in pictures by a slew of news organizations and amateurs (all credited on the screen) who were that day’s Raphaels and Michelangelos.

What they captured is a map of catastrophe and misery that straddles centuries and millenniums as well as continents, giving continuity to suffering and survival. These are frescoes of humanity in trouble. On New Yorkers’ faces and in their voices is the torment of England’s heavily blitzed London and Coventry, and Germany’s bomb-flattened Dresden, in World War II. Their tears are the tears of black Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, the anguish of this decade’s southern Sudan and Sierra Leone, the heartache of Israeli and Palestinian mourners in today’s Middle East.

Has there ever been anything, however, quite like seeing desperate souls trapped inside these dying twin towers choosing to dive to their deaths? Caught here in an Associated Press photo by Richard Drew is one of these falling forms, frozen in time as macabre visual poetry.

Has there ever been anything, also, quite like recorded phone messages left by other trapped victims?

A man speaking in gasps: “Neil, it’s Brian. A plane crashed into the trade center. It’s on fire and I’m in it and I can’t breathe.”

A woman: “Jill, there’s a fire on my floor. I love you. Tell Nicole I love her. I don’t know if I’m going to be OK here. I love you so much.”

As choking fumes and dust billow outside the south tower, meanwhile, a woman on the ground floor is heard calling to an anonymous savior: “Oh, my God, you saved my life! You saved my life! Thank you!”

One more tribute, one more nameless hero.

“In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01” premieres Sunday night at 9 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.