It’s always a challenge to a film-maker when everybody already
knows the story he’s trying to tell. The plot automatically becomes
a formality, and there’s no point trying to build suspense. Paul
Greengrass’s United 93 got around this problem, to some
extent, by substituting for suspense the almost unbearable pathos
that lay in the contrast between what we knew was going to happen
and what the passengers didn’t. Oliver Stone’s World Trade
Center, shot from a screenplay by Andrea Berloff, adopts a
similar approach but with less success — partly because his focus
is on the true story of two of the very few happy endings on
September 11th, 2001, and partly because the powerful emotions his
film generates become excessive and intellectually fatiguing in the
absence of any rational framework to contain them.
All credit to Mr. Stone for resisting the temptation to supply
some nutty left-wing, JFK-type conspiracy theory to
explain things, but without one he seems all at sea and unable to
touch on the political dimension of the tragedy at all. There’s
just one moment when he does try to provide a bit of context. This
is when Marine Sergeant Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) says, “We’re
going to need some good men out there to avenge this.” But there’s
not a word about who did “this,” or why, or where “there” is — the
place or places where we’re going to need some good men.
On the plus side, taking away the context adds to the emotional
impact of the story. Mr. Stone allows us to experience the events
of that awful morning at the World Trade Center as the people on
the ground would have experienced them at the time, without the
benefit of television and other suppliers of instant context. When
the first plane hits the north tower, we are in the day room of the
Port Authority Police, from where can be heard just a faint boom in
the distance. What was that? From there until the building
collapses on top of the film’s heroes, PAPD Sergeant John
McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena),
all is a flurry of rumor and misinformation. First it’s a private
plane, then a commuter plane that “ran out of gas or something” and
then, when the awful truth begins to dawn, the Port Authority
Police on the way to the scene argue about the reliability of
reports of a plane hitting the second tower. Someone says that the
Pentagon has been “hit by a missile or something” and somebody else
that Israel has been nuked.
“The whole freakin’ world is coming to an end today,” says one
of the cops, more truly than he knows.
The movie even plays with those familiar TV images that make us
think we understand more than we do about what we are, apparently,
seeing. When it cuts from the cops trapped under the rubble to
their anxious families, waiting for news, one of the family members
looks exasperatedly at the television and says: “They keep showing
the same thing over and over.” It’s a reminder that we can now
hardly separate the events of 9/11 from our experience of them on
TV. We can’t get those pictures of the burning and collapsing
towers out of our heads, yet that’s what we have to do in order to
feel again the impact that they had upon us. Not to mention the
impact they had on those at the scene. I particularly liked the way
in which, when Officer Jimeno is finally pulled out alive, he looks
up and said, “Hey! Where’d the buildings go?” Their absence is hard
to fathom even when they have been lying on top of you.
His is one of four very strong central characters — the two
cops and their wives — whose portrayal it would be hard to
overpraise. Nicolas Cage has never looked less movie-starrish and
his understated performance, much of it with nothing but his face,
covered in dust and framed by rubble, is one of the film’s saving
graces. Oliver Stone, unfortunately, doesn’t do understatement.
Maria Bello as Mrs. McLoughlin and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Mrs. Jimeno
are also great at showing us the oscillation between hope and
despair, and the sympathy they evoke in others, and that is evoked
in them by those who are less fortunate, helps to prevent their
atypical experience as loved ones of the missing from striking us
as a falsification of the day’s events.
Yet all four are remarkable for their passivity. None can do
anything but suffer and wait. Mr. Stone’s camera can’t resist the
unhealthy urge to relish this suffering, mental and physical, more
than is good for the film — and thus reinforce its already
unfortunate tendency to make a terror attack look like an act of
God. The people who actually do something — Sergeant Karnes,
another Marine known only as Thomas (William Mapother) and the
fireman (Stephen Dorff) and paramedic (Frank Whaley) responsible
for getting the victims out — are shadowy figures whose calmly
dutiful actions make little impact next to the emotional drama of
the grandly suffering principals.
If it had made more of them and their actions and rather less of
the sea of suffering in which they paddled the movie might have
found something of the context that it lacks. Such people remind us
that heroism is not just suffering but also duty and courage and
resolution — and, yes, anger and defiance and violence against
those who have committed violence against us. In the end someone
says that on 9/11 we learned something about evil, of course, but
also something about good — the good of “people taking care of
each other.” This would have been a better movie if it had also had
something to say about the good of those who are willing to take
care of the monsters — and their sponsors and protectors — who
did such things.
