IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Air India 182, which aired last night on CBC, puts me in the rare position of not only recommending a CBC production that isn�t Dragon�s Den, but insisting that you make time to catch the film when it re-airs. CBC viewership figures, much as they might be spun to make it look like the national broadcaster is constantly on the verge of recovering its profile among viewers, suggest nonetheless that anything that airs on the network stands a worse chance of being seen by the average Canadian than a Simpsons re-run.
If a kind of Pavlovian aversion to CBC programming should prevent anyone from seeing Sturla Gunnarson�s dramatized recreation of the 1985 bombing of an Air India jumbo jet en route from Canada to England, it would be a shame. This is exactly the sort of project the CBC would be commissioning -- not occasionally but almost monthly -- in a better world.
Gunnarson is the director who made the far better movie version of Beowulf � the one that cost a fraction of Robert Zemeckis� recent heavily hyped travesty, with its embarrassing videogame digital sheen. His retelling of the Air India 182 story borrows a few formal touches from Paul Greengrass� United 93, but paces itself more gravely, as if in response to the passage of time in which the tragedy has resonated.
Time flashes back and forth in the first half of the film as the events leading up to the bombing come into focus, and then seems to blow apart in slow motion in the aftermath of the plane's disappearance over the North Atlantic. We�re allowed to understand how hard it would have been to prevent the bombing with what information the RCMP had up until that point � in situations like this, hindsight is inevitably all too clear � while the underfunding and bureaucratic blunders of the country�s intelligence services make their appearance on cue; a muddleheaded CSIS policy of erasing wiretaps after having them transcribed would lead to two key suspects in the plot by Sikh extremists being acquitted.
Even as it was happening, the events surrounding Air India 182 often seemed confusing. There was an unfortunate tendency to treat it as an internal dispute within the Indian and Sikh communities, typifed by then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney�s puzzling apology to the Indian government, but not the families of Canadians who actually died in the bombing. Gunnarson somehow manages to make it all clear, without swamping the film in details and lessening the still-raw emotional trauma that marks those left behind.
Air India 182 re-airs next Sunday at 10pm on CBC Newsworld and it deserves a few more airings, as well as a decent life on DVD, if only to give the network a prominent model for how to fulfill its mandate.
See Also
