Advertisement

arts entertainmentMovies

Remarkable 'Tower' returns us to a fatal day in Austin history

The remarkable new documentary Tower takes us back to a time before school shootings were a national epidemic, a time when the country's innocence could be blown to bits by a deranged citizen with a rifle.

The remarkable new documentary Tower takes us back to a time before school shootings were a national epidemic, a time when America's innocence could be blown to bits by a deranged citizen with a rifle. That was 50 years ago, when engineering student Charles Whitman perched  atop the University of Texas Tower and unleashed 96 minutes of terror. By the time he was done, 16 were dead and 33 injured.

Tower is not Whitman's story, which is no more or less distinctive than those of the campus mass murderers who have followed in his footsteps. The film is about the people on the ground, the victims and the heroes and the bystanders. Director Keith Maitland, working from Pamela Colloff's oral history published in Texas Monthly, puts you at the scene of a horrific crime as it unfolds.

Advertisement

Maitland's approach is innovative and resourceful but somehow not showy. The animation in Tower isn't a gimmick; it's the best way to tell this particular story. The film shows us realistic, rotoscope versions of the principal characters as they were that day, with actors reading the first-hand accounts from Colloff's oral history. Late in the film, when we see footage of survivors as they are now, we feel as if we've been roused from a dream state. In these moments Tower manages to collapse the space between past and present, which, given the timeliness of the subject matter, has a haunting effect.

(Courtesy of Kino Lorber)

Those injured but not killed include a 17-year-old paperboy and a pregnant, 18-year-old anthropology student. That student, Claire Wilson, is the film's emotional fulcrum. Laying on the scorching hot concrete of the mall, a few feet from her dead fiancé, Claire is aided first by a fellow student, Rita Starpattern, who lays down next to the injured woman and keeps her conscious by engaging in conversation. Meanwhile, 17-year-old incoming freshman John Fox, who wandered over to campus without realizing the danger, hides beneath a hedge until he decides he no longer can. He risks his own life by scurrying onto the mall and dragging Claire to safety.

You can picture the Hollywood version of all this in your mind's eye, but there's really no need. Tower is the latest example of what documentary can do when it abandons a standard talking head approach. In blending animation, archive footage, and first-hand testimony, the film conjures a heightened sense of reality worthy of its subject. Tower is a triumph of form.

News Roundups

Catch up on the day's news you need to know.

Or with:

But that doesn't make it some kind of aesthetic exercise. The loss, sacrifice and heroism displayed that day ring loud and clear, from the university bookstore manager who accompanies the police officers to the top of the tower to the shell-shocked students captured on film in the wake of the shooting. Their lives will never be the same, and their pain, sadly, will eventually become all too familiar.

TowerA

Directed by Keith Maitland. Not rated (gun violence). At the Alamo Drafthouse Cedars. (Also at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Dec. 2-4). 96 mins.