Confronted with a difficult decision by ‘United 93’

How audacious, really, to start with a prayer. To begin a movie about a spectacular public tragedy with that most private and intimate of acts: a murmured entreaty to God.

In the first scene in “United 93,” a terrorist prays. He knows that this is the last day of his life. His victims do not, cannot, know that this is the last day of theirs. The simple disparity -- his dark certainty, their obliviousness -- gives the film a ferocious emotional kick.

But maybe you’re not in the mood to be kicked. Maybe you’re not quite ready for this kind of blow. Maybe you want to let a little more time pass before lowering yourself, inch by painful inch, into the vat of superbly organized reminiscence labeled “United 93.” More than any artistic creation in recent memory, “United 93” -- which traces the fate of the last plane snatched by homicidal hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001 -- transcends genre.

It’s not simply a movie. It’s a decision. A choice not only about how you want to spend your time, but also about where you want to put your mind: into the furnace of the worst memory in the nation’s recent history, or not.

Or maybe, just not yet.

“I don’t think I’m quite ready for that,” said the woman standing ahead of me in the line at the coffee place.

It was Saturday afternoon. I had just left the day’s first showing of “United 93” at a theater here, a sellout. Strangers were talking spontaneously about the film -- the film, and the cold rain that was turning downtown Chicago into a slimy gray blur -- and when I stopped for coffee and heard a woman in line talking about “United 93,” I said I’d just seen it.

She shivered. It wasn’t because of the cold.

“Not yet,” she said, and other people in line echoed her sentiment with nods and head shakes and lowered eyelids. They weren’t being shallow or cowardly; just honest. They’ll get to “United 93.” And it will be waiting.

Certain creative works become overnight touchstones, become part of the cultural air we all breathe. They are instant referendums on where we are, on how we are, and most important, perhaps, on who we are. Thus even if you haven’t seen “United 93” yet, it has affected you. You’ve had to think about it. To decide how you feel about the film and how you feel, period -- lo these five years later -- about Sept. 11 and the concentric rings of meaning that continue to ripple from its still-vibrating core.

Thus it follows that the real measure of the force of “United 93” may not be box office receipts or tallies of Oscar nominations -- much as the film’s makers would doubtless appreciate such compliments -- but rather how long it retains this status as an event, not a movie. As a dampened finger in the cultural wind.

The creative blowback from Sept. 11 has been manifold, and includes sculpture, documentaries, ballads and novels such as Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” artistic responses that range up and down the scale of quality and popularity and potential longevity.

More, of course, are on the way.

But “United 93” is something else. It’s the first work inspired by Sept. 11 to ascend to that special stratosphere of art reserved for the absolutely extraordinary.

No publicist can put it there.

No amount of clever marketing or online teasers or hokey tie-ins with kids’ meals at burger joints can do the trick, either. It has to get there on its own.

You hear people talking about “United 93” on the street -- an old-fashioned, hopelessly anecdotal barometer of public mood that nonetheless is powerfully convincing. On the street, and on the train, and in the line for a latte, and when you ask people if they intend to see it, they don’t ask you what “it” is.

Because so much of the movie occurs within the cabin of the doomed flight, some critics have taken to calling it “claustrophobic.” Hardly.

In fact, “United 93” helped me understand at last Thomas Merton’s seemingly oxymoronic description of joining a monastery, recounted in his classic spiritual autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain”; it marked, he wrote, “the four walls of my new freedom.”

The plane plummets, but not before the passengers act with strength and faith.

“United 93” starts with prayer and ends with silence -- which, under the circumstances, is just a space waiting to be filled with prayers, prayers that cancel out the perverse parody of a prayer that comes from a terrorist.

The cabin of Flight 93 didn’t enclose. It liberated.

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Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.