Movie Review: Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: Knights in Distress

I was so grateful that Oliver Stone's World Trade Center wasn't overheated to the point of derangement, in the manner of his "political" hallucinations JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995), that I feel a little guilty for not responding to it more. Stone should be encouraged to stay off whatever he used to smoke, but he tones it down so much that World Trade Center is like a yawningly uplifting TV movie. There are many states of mind between delirium and coma, but whatever else it may be, Stone's talent is not a moderate one.

World Trade Center is the story of two members of the Port Authority Police Department who were among the last, few people to be pulled alive from the rubble of the collapsed towers on September 11th. Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) is an unsmilingly earnest 21-year veteran who knows the building complex intimately. When he hears news of the first plane, he heads downtown and leads a troop of volunteers into the burning buildings to rescue people on the floors above. Willy Jimeno (Michael Peña) is a rookie under McLoughlin, who knows he's following the best leader. But no one could have achieved what these men attempted; they're still in the Concourse when the South Tower collapses. Both McLoughlin and Jimeno are pinned under slabs of concrete twenty feet below ground level.

Structurally, the screenplay by Andrea Berloff is an oddity. McLoughlin and Jimeno are two fearless knights who are alert but helpless during the battle of their lives--they're heroes almost entirely in intention. For most of the picture they're pretty much immobile (except for one arm apiece), unaware of what has happened, unsure if anyone will find them before they fatally hemorrhage or are crushed. All they can do is fight off sleep, in the belief they'll live longer if they do, though McLoughlin thinks they have only 14 hours.

The entire action thus covers what would be a single episode in an epic narrative; it's as if the Odyssey, for instance, featured only the adventure in Polyphemus's cave (and ended with an unfraught reunion with Penelope). In other words, World Trade Center reduces narrative entirely to a single ordeal (albeit part of a larger ordeal that will be a bold heading in future history books, as one character points out). It's a trial in which the knights remain nearly motionless, their great struggle simply to stay awake.

The movie doesn't stay below ground with the trapped knights, however, but opens the situation up by showing what McLoughlin and Jimeno remember about their wives, and what their distraught wives remember about them. McLoughlin's wife Donna (Maria Bello), mother of his four kids, is a relatively stoic woman who believes all she can do is wait for word. Her younger son, who mistakes her stoicism for indifference, prods her into going to Manhattan to find John. Jimeno's wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), pregnant with their second daughter, is more impatient than Donna, but her energy is mostly wasted. She can't sit still, but of course she can't accomplish anything, either. (Her restless trip to the drug store is a highlight because it makes its point without undue emphasis--Allison is dizzy in anticipation of grief.)

Both damsels help their imperiled husbands more than they know, however, by giving them something to hang on for. That becomes the rationale for the movie's back-and-forth between the men losing strength in the bowels of the ruins and the women fretting and hoping. Currently there are no actresses I'd rather watch than Bello and Gyllenhaal, and they're never trite here (though neither is quite convincing as a working-class woman, in part because of the formulaic way the script has them interact with their children), but this structure is a mistake, and not only because Stone imposes no discernible movie making rhythm on it. The movie's real mistake is to take as its focus the single least unusual aspect of September 11--the fact that the murdered and wounded loved their families and were loved back. Though the script is fact-based, it inevitably smacks of old-fashioned Hollywood idealization: would the men's ordeal be less moving if they had been on the verge of divorces, or lousy fathers?

The handling is nonetheless slightly eccentric, in that the memories of the alternately numb and pain-wracked men merge with phantasms. The parched Jimeno can see lights above through a parting in the wreckage and it becomes a vision of Jesus with a burning heart coming to him with a plastic water bottle; an apparitional Donna tells McLoughlin to get off his ass and come home to finish the cabinets he started. The latter would play better if we hadn't already been cued by dialogue that Donna was upset about her unfinished kitchen. The script's generally kinkless, unideological approach could use more of this kind of particularity, and a subtler, even comic touch. The only detail with the right kind of incidental charm is when Jimeno reminisces about wanting to be a cop since watching Starsky and Hutch as a kid: as soon as he heard the theme song he'd chase his sister around the house and arrest her.

The men are rescued through the efforts of Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a senior accountant with Deloitte & Touche in Connecticut, and a devout ex-marine, who feels called by the attacks to defend his country. He confides in his minister, gets a high-and-tight haircut, and walks into Ground Zero, identifying himself as an active marine. He'd rather give up his name than his rank; when asked for a shorter handle than "Staff Sergeant Karnes," he says, "You can call me Staff Sergeant." Stone doesn't get the full nutty flavor of this exchange (Karnes's eccentricity may itself explain why he undertook this mission at all), but the director doesn't seem very committed to the religious aspect introduced by Karnes, either. Karnes's actions are based in fact, but there's something ectoplasmic about the character that Stone doesn't quite know how to integrate into the straightforward power-of-familial-love context. Shannon starts giving off a psycho-killer buzz and Stone drops him after he's served his purpose.

It's as if Stone anticipated being accused of making an Oliver Stone movie, of exploiting this sensitive material that we fiercely feel belongs to all of us. The script might have worked if it were more complex, an epic of all the survivors and their families, or, alternately, if it were more stripped-down. (And it wouldn't necessarily be offensive if it were broken up more imaginatively as the two men's minds inevitably wander.)

In fact, the best thing in the movie is a stretch in which burning matter starts raining down on the trapped officers; it heats the space up so much that the service revolver of one of their fallen comrades starts spontaneously firing. Jimeno screams because he's getting burned, but McLoughlin is so purely terrified he's screaming, too. This is the one moment when you feel that Stone has recreated what it must actually have been like to be down there--at the center of the débacle and yet almost entirely in the dark. (When Jimeno is pulled out on a stretcher we find out he didn't even realize that the towers had collapsed.) Cage, that most physical of talkity actors, and Peña play most of the movie with only their faces visible, covered with dust and lost in shadows. In those few horrifying minutes, Stone reduces the movie to sheer experience, and it's probably the most powerful film making of his career, because you don't have to discount it for his usual bombast and coarse expressionism.

Overall, however, World Trade Center is as square, and minimally satisfying, as a standard-grade World War II movie. In the most positive sense, Peña's baby-face reminds you of the precociously responsible boys and girls who saved the free world in the 1940s. In a more ironic sense, the brave wives remind you of phony-sententious home-front fare like Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944), which were, of course, hugely popular in their day.

World Trade Center probably doesn't have enough action or humor to capture audiences as those two movies did. It does have sensational special effects, which are never meretriciously "thrilling," but Stone handles the action so poorly that at one point he gives the mistaken impression that one of the Port Authority officers has killed himself. Not to mention, in conventional romance-narrative terms it's a problem that the heroes are prostrated while Karnes, the effective hero, is only peripheral. If the events depicted hadn't actually happened and hadn't been part of an historic act of aggression, the narrative's peculiarities, as well as the movie's haphazard rhythms and bland emotionality, would be more apparent. Still, Stone's movie is bland enough to make people think it's a good thing, a healing experience. And since this seems to be the kind of thing many, probably most, American moviegoers appreciate, who knows, maybe it is.