In the storied Hollywood history of career colonics, there’s never quite been as distinctively psychologically premonitory a movie as World Trade Center, or at least not recently. As directed by Oliver Stone, it’s a repudiation of all that the filmmaker has most come to embody over the last two decades — his swaggering anti-authoritarianism, his distended style, his cynical (I won’t bow to the reductive, desultory tag of “conspiracy”) perspectives and overtly masculinized frames; honestly, it feels like a mea culpa filed from the set of Alexander. Lacking angles, lacking controversy, lacking context — surprising for a man who so loves tangled background — World Trade Center is an unerringly conscientious, professional and emotionally engaging film, if also never a particular uniquely enlightening one. and based on a true story, <B><I>World Trade Center</I> opens with the wordless awakenings of two of the men who will report to the titular site in the wake of the terrorist attacks</B> in New York City on the morning of September 11. <B>John McLoughlin</B> (Nicolas Cage) is the Port Authority shift sergeant who leads a crew of first responders, which includes <B>Will Jimeno</B> (Michael Peña) and several other officers (Jay Hernandez and Antonio Rodrigues), to the North Tower. An expert on the site from its 1993 attack, McLoughlin leads his group in preparation for a rescue mission to the top floors, even as we’re fed a sense of the confusion of the moment via all manner of incomplete and conflicting information. <STRONG>Then, in a sudden rush, the first of World Trade Center towers collapses</STRONG>.<BR><BR>Chased, in a harrowing sequence, by a roaring, black wall of concrete, glass, steel and dust, the group dives headlong into an elevator shaft as tons of debris rains down upon them. The rest of the film intercuts John and Will, massively wounded and pinned beneath this rubble, with the stories of their respective spouses — John’s wife Donna (Maria Bello, sporting unnervingly blue contact lenses) and Will’s pregnant wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) — and a gung-ho ex-Marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who ignores concerns about the disaster site’s structural stability and heads up the mission to save them.<BR><BR>You’ll notice that there’s a lot less talk about <I>World Trade Center</I> being “too soon” after September 11 than there was attached to <A href=)
Universal’s United 93 earlier this year. Part of this is due to the latter film being the first major studio project out of the gate, certainly, but is the true measure of healing really an extra four months? (We also have the added distraction of Mel Gibson’s drunken slurs, a benefit only insomuch as the fact that only so much reprimanding entertainment news can be foregrounded in the first 12 minutes of any given regular newscast.) But World Trade Center is also by design a movie of much more comfort, a movie of easy affirmation. It doesn’t confront us with any of the hijackers themselves, or ask us to consider the distressing choices of those Americans aboard a doomed jetliner. It instead delivers a flipside portrait of the unbelievable courage and resolve found in those reacting — purely and instinctively — to correspondingly incredible tragedy.
Reduced to a pair of eyes and covered visage for much of the film, Cage delivers a performance rooted in palpable regret. As they stave off death — jointly trapped but out of sight from one another — John and Will’s mutual urgings and conversations cover a range of topics, but center plaintively around their families. “I married the right one, you know?” says John at one point to a similar affirmation by Will, even though the film doesn’t shy away from showing us the former’s uncommunicative marriage, beset by problems of withdrawal. Using a variety of time-tested, low-fi means (fade-ins and -outs wherein John imagines alternate scenarios), World Trade Center slowly makes us believe what our eyes at first can’t confirm, the weight of these words. It also makes deft use of all sorts of small details — pebbles and dust being literally vacuumed out of the mouths of those pulled from rubble, for instance — to bring home the horror of that living hell.
The character of Dave Karnes, though, is problematic as rendered here, in that he embodies most robustly an emotion — laser-focused vengeance — that predominates the days and weeks after September 11, but not its swirling eye center. Swooping down from… where, exactly?, Karnes is given to steely-eyed glares and sanctimonious statements like, “I don’t know if you all know this, but we’re at war,” and, “We’re gonna need some good men to avenge this,” delivered to himself more than anyone else. Dave is first shown glimpsing the attacks on television. Then he goes to get a haircut (a “jarhead” job, he asks for), consult tersely with his priest and slip back into his old military fatigues before reporting for self-activated duty at ground zero. All of this, including the haircut, may be true (in fact, I almost assume it is), but it rings false in its juxtaposition to the rest of this narrative.
For a movie so baldly emotive — I’m not being flip when I say that World Trade Center is Stone’s most feminine work — overt flag-waving of this nature comes across as goading, perfunctory patriotism. We don’t need someone to remind us that we hate the terrorists — we hate those who take the lives of more than 2,750 innocent civilians, citizens from over 80 different countries — because we certainly do. What makes memories of that day so quickly summon a lump in the throat is the utter disbelief we recall, and the surging sympathies it brings forward. While a quality dramatization in many respects, World Trade Center lacks a bit in that department. (Paramount, PG-13, 123 minutes)