Nov 10, 2006 03:35 PM
2623 Views
Dir: Oliver Stone.
Cast: Nicholas Cage, Michael Pena, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Michael Shannon.
When I heard that the famously loopy Oliver Stone was following up his mega-flop Alexander with a movie about 9/11, I groaned. But I had second thoughts. The idea did have a certain barmy appeal. Would the cinema's premier conspiracy theorist - remember JFK, in which he practically blamed Lyndon B. Johnson for assassinating Kennedy? - try to pretend the horrible events were part of some Zionist plot, or a campaign by the American military-industrial complex to justify an incredibly lucrative war on terror? Would this be the movie that turned Middle America into an angry mob calling for Oliver Stone to be strung up?
Suprisingly, perhaps, the director has no such agenda. Though this is an Oliver Stone film, it could just as easily have been made by any decent Hollywood hack: Ron Howard, say, or Robert Zemeckis. Stone doesn't have anything to say about 9/11, except that it brought out a lot of courage and resourcefulness in the rescuers, and I think most of us knew that.
I suspect the critical pounding he received for the woeful Alexander may partially explain his kid-glove approach here and why I found World Trade Center lacking in certain aspects. Where United 93 - Paul Greengrass's far more effective film about 9/11 - avoided establishing a personal connection with the people involved, Stone has taken the opposite approach.
Scripted by Andrea Berloff, this tells the admittedly moving story of Port Authority Sergeant John McLoughlin (Cage) and Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), two out of only twenty people who survived the collapse of the towers. Crushed by the debris and unable to move, McLoughlin and Jimeno have no idea how badly they are injured, but rely on each other's company to pull through the horrific ordeal until they are rescued.
As their stories play out, Stone makes the mistake of leaving these two men for a number of inadequately developd subplots that just ot in the way. While awaiting news, Jimeno's pregnant wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) grapples with the possibilty that she will have to explain to her four-year-old daughter that her father isn't coming home, and McLoughlin's wife Donna (Maira Bello) tries to put on a brave face in front of their four children. Also figuring into things is ex-Marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a religious bloke who believes he has received word from God to make his way to the World Trade Center site and help out.
The film is less exclusively masculine than most of Stone's movies. He has no deeper purpose, I suspect, than to tell a stirring story. He never tries to explain the events of 9/11, or analyse their cause and effects. He merely reassures us about the good in human nature - well, American human nature, at least.
There is never any doubt about the emotions he intends us to feel. Whether or not you feel them as intensely as he wishes you to will depend very much on your resistance to patriotic music, flag-waving and other traditional demonstrations of Hollywood sentimentality. Most of them are here, and Stone doesn't do anything by halves.
The director seems to be arguing, with more than a touch of sanctimoniousness, that his two leading characters deserved to survive because of their faith and their love of family. Of course, this doesn't call into question what the thousands of other victims of this and similar attacks had not done to deserve salvation.
In confusing his attention to one, very narrow aspect of a disaster with huge ramifications, he also appears to be trying, rather clumsily, to avoid the far more controversial, depressing realities of the 9/11 aftermath, which (it has to be said) reflect far less gloriously on the American psyche.
World Trade Center is, in many ways, the most mainstream of Stone's films. It's a more lowbrow, less thoughtful movie than United 93, and much more of a straightforward morale-booster.
By playing it safe Stone achieves the impossible task of making the single most jaw-dropping event in our lifetime seem almost dull.
