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| The Looming Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
But then Chesney zeroes in on the suspect in a way that twists the conversation so slowly toward accusation and ultimately confession that you almost don’t realize it’s happened. Why is there blood on the suspect’s hands but not on his clothes if he didn’t completely change his outfit? Why’s the price tag still on his belt? By the time Chesney is shouting and pounding on the table between the two men to extract viable intelligence (the phone number of an al-Qaeda higher-up), the scene has spiraled in on itself so skillfully that the audience has been manipulated just as much as the suspect.
A lot of this works because of Camp, who’s masterful in the part. And just as much is thanks to director John Dahl, who gives a scene that’s just two men talking in a room a sense of pace and excitement that’s inescapable. (I love how often he pins his camera on one of the two men as the other is talking, to judge their reactions as they try to figure out what they’re going to say next to achieve their goals.) And, sure, much of it is informed by the fact that we in the audience know Chesney and his cohorts won’t be successful in stopping the big attack that’s coming. Indeed, if you’ve read the book, you know one of the characters will die in that very attack.
But I really appreciate how writer Bash Doran didn’t push too hard with this scene. She simply let it play out like an interrogation scene you’ve seen in many other cop dramas, as the two men circle each other warily and look for weakness. The Looming Tower gains strength from its familiarity, from the way it engages with how cop dramas can use their workaday characters and scenarios to talk about issues that impact society as a whole. More recent police procedurals, which are far more rigid in how they think about solving a case per week, have lost sight of that just a bit. The Looming Tower, by virtue of its ultimate endpoint, knows that every case solved just leads to more suspects to track down.
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