Fifteen minutes into Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, there is a sound you have never heard. Perhaps you imagined it for an instant. If you did, you never got far. It's unfathomable, the sound of those twin towers collapsing, as heard from inside the towers. In Stone's movie, it's the sound of huge metallic redwood trees giving a sickening moan then splitting in slow motion, or maybe the sound of a ship's hull popping and crinkling under pressure then imploding.
There's an image attached.
If World Trade Center contributes anything to the slowly expanding body of 9/11 pictures, it's these evocative re-enactments of spots where no cameras stood; it's based on the actual story of two survivors. We're in the shopping mall-like concourse between the north and south towers. There's a small immediate-response team preparing to enter an elevator. Outside the windows periodic booms go off, each nearly identical; these are people hitting the ground. Port Authority police Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) hooks up with a few officers. They speak in the overly casual tones of men who have no option left but forward.
"We'll be OK," one of the men tells Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena). He says this with glazed eyes and a dazed voice, like the soldier in Platoon who welcomes Charlie Sheen to a different kind of war zone. That awful sound begins. The men freeze. A gray hurricane of soot builds outside the window.
Everything goes black.
It's in this spot where the majority of World Trade Center unfolds, albeit hundreds of feet beneath that spot, among slabs of concrete, twisted tangles of metal, fires, and sparking cables.
Coming to consciousness, Jimeno and McLoughlin find themselves in silence with their limbs pinned. Jimeno is on his back, a slab on his stomach; McLoughlin is sandwiched on his side, face caked in dust, unable to move anything but an eyeball and (just barely) his mouth. It's the image of a makeshift tomb, and in Stone's most virtuoso moment, his camera makes that hopelessness all too evident. It rises through layers of rubble as if it were bedrock, hovers over Ground Zero, climbs until we see all of lower Manhattan. Then higher still, until we're in orbit, watching from a satellite.
That sequence is both a good example of what Stone is trying to achieve and a potent reminder of what's wrong here. About half the picture focuses so acutely on its characters, who are either trapped under rubble or waiting for word on survivors, there's as much claustrophobia in not knowing what comes next as there is in the physical situation of the two police officers; when it operates in miniature, World Trade Center is a heartfelt lesson in courage and an honorable tribute to the compassion average people showed that day.
When the picture broadens, you're aware of watching a dramatization and all that entails. Arriving today - precisely five years, one month, and two days after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 - Stone's earnest picture asks something quite different from the question that nagged the release of United 93, the first major 9/11 film from a studio. United was tagged with the ubiquitous "Is it too soon?" World Trade Center asks, inadvertently, a more provocative question: "It is too soon for 9/11 nostalgia?"
Or rather, "Is it too soon for a 9/11 flick with a happy ending?"
Wait, don't answer.
Oliver Stone made this?
The same Oliver Stone who made JFK, Wall Street, Salvador? It says here in the press notes, he did; it says there on the cover of Newsweek, he did. But it's still hard to believe, and I don't necessarily mean that as criticism.
World Trade Center just lacks his usual attention to corruption and politics; for a director best known for running a fever at all times, the shock is how conventional World Trade Center plays.
United 93 - though better than any film Stone has ever made (and I say that as a fan) - cut so close to the bone, it left audiences shaking. It's more like the 9/11 movie you'd assume Stone would attempt. Which isn't to say he has lost his skills. The early scenes are melancholy and elegiac, precisely the mood he wants to maintain from start to finish but struggles with: We see New York City waking up. Dogs being walked. People buying coffee. Subways filling with passengers. So far, so good. Until we get a shot of the towers at dawn, and the most useless dateline in the history of useless movie datelines, "September 11, 2001."
World Trade Center settles into that pattern - smartly noticed details followed by unbearable kitsch followed by a scene that knocks you out with its grace.
Take the attack itself. It's seen from street level. Or rather, it's not seen. Jimeno is pacing a bus terminal when a shadow passes over, climbs a building, a second passes, then the street rocks with thunder. We know only as much as the characters, which means their wives, in particular, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, know next to nothing about the fate of their husbands.
There's not a lot of room for characterization here. Indeed, United 93 did away with it altogether. Perhaps that's only right; no one person that day was any more or less important than any other. But there is a trade-off. When faces get uplifting-movie noble, and exposition tossed out improbably ("We planned for everything. But not this."), and children stared at meaningfully one last time, these could be characters in just another disaster movie. Not surprisingly, the most vibrant character is the one who looks somewhat unhinged.
This is David Karnes, who is a real guy (played here by Michael Shannon). A former Marine who shows hints of being slightly fundamentalist, he walks out on his job in Connecticut, gets his head shaved, prays, throws on his old military uniform, drives into the city, and sneaks across the barricades to help yank survivors out of the wreckage. His only credentials, Shannon gets across, was his ability to size up a situation and act without deliberation. It's what was needed.
World Trade Center is reminiscent primarily of old war movies where enemies were clear cut and courage stoic, underscored by swelling orchestras. It's not an unwarranted approach, but it does flatten out the details into a more convenient narrative. Cage and Pena (from Crash) convey doubt and the release of an inevitable death with nothing more than a look in their eyes and a gasp in their voices. And what do they talk about while they wait? Their families. Their chances. And other war movies.
The day of the attack what you heard repeatedly was how much it felt and even looked like a disaster movie - a summer spectacular from Jerry Bruckheimer. Now we've come full-circle, and the one director who might have pointed out the irony plays nice.
Are there politics here?
You decide. The conservative groups that have tried to claim the picture as their own certainly think so. But that's odd. What World Trade Center shares with United 93 is a refusal to make politics a backdrop. At least overtly. One of the film's finer points is we were united that day. Stone shows scenes of worldwide vigils. Is it too much to assume Stone, not a dumb guy, sees both compassion in those gestures and sadness that such good-will was squandered?
Here's a better question:
Why did Stone make this?
No 9/11 movie can hope to contain everything, every vantage, every resulting action and inaction, in one package. But again, here's the guy who would have normally tried such an audacious feat. If United 93 is an abstract memorial, this is more like the kind they erect in a town square - sturdy and polite and honorable. And I'm glad there are both kinds. Let's not forget Stone, who served in Vietnam, is one of the few filmmakers working today who isn't merely informed about the world from what he's taken from films. He knows what war feels like. He also knows there's a lot more to it.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.
First Published August 9, 2006, 11:13 a.m.
