TOWER (Keith Maitland). 81 minutes. Opens Friday (October 14). See listing. Rating: NNN
At noon on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman started shooting people from the observation deck of the University of Texas clock tower in Austin. Before he was stopped 96 minutes later, Whitman had killed 14 people and wounded another 33.
Keith Maitland’s Tower recreates Whitman’s siege faithfully – sort of. We see the events as they unfold, played out in close to real time, as actors read interviews with survivors and witnesses.
But the whole thing is presented in digital animation, rendered in the same rotoscoped process as Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.
It’s a daring choice, but I don’t know that it fully works: the animation distracts us from the fact that we’re watching a dramatization rather than a documentary, but it also distances us from the horror and immediacy of the event.
It’s definitely artful but more than a little frustrating.
