WORLD TRADE CENTER
(three stars)
Oliver’s twist.
Running time: 128 minutes. Rated PG-13 (intense and emotional content, disturbing images and mild profanity). At the Ziegfeld, the Chelsea, the First and 62nd, others.
LESS than a month after 9/11, I attended a panel discussion at Lincoln Center where Oliver Stone said he wanted to make “a bullet of a film about terrorism, like ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ ” which sympathizes with terrorists.
Five years later, the leftleaning director has delivered “World Trade Center,” a physically impressive, well-acted, sometimes emotionally powerful – and mostly apolitical – re-creation of that awful day that has some conservative pundits praising Stone as some sort of born-again patriot.
As a card-carrying cynic and political conspiracist, I’m more inclined to credit this alleged change of heart to Stone’s need for a boxoffice hit – so he can continue working on a big studio canvas after flops like “Alexander.”
And he may well have found the ticket with “World Trade Center,” an expertly crafted, respectful piece of inspirational filmmaking centering on two Port Authority cops who were pulled from the rubble. It represents Stone’s most mainstream, crowd-pleasing work since “Platoon” and “Wall Street” in the 1980s.
With his finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist and abetted by a no-frills star performance by Nicholas Cage, Stone’s PG-13-rated movie is more sentimental and less gut-wrenching than the artier (and R-rated) “United 93” – though its depiction of 9/11 is still tough enough that “WTC” isn’t likely to be a big draw with the date-movie or the “too soon” crowd.
Cage plays John McLoughlin, a P.A. veteran who was leading a contingent of brave officers from the P.A. bus terminal in the evacuation on WTC’s shopping-mall concourse when the first tower started collapsing above.
McLoughlin worked for 12 years at the WTC and won an award for helping in the evacuation of the 1993 bomb attack, so he instinctively warned everybody to run for the elevator shaft, the strongest part of the structure.
Two officers made it, though one of them, Dominick Pezzulo (Jay Hernandez) died (arguably the movie’s toughest scene to watch) when the second tower came roaring down. That left McLoughlin and rookie Will Jimeno (Michael Pena in a star-making turn) wedged beneath slabs of concrete and twisted metal some 20 feet below the ground for two days.
This is the heart of the movie, filled with a palpable sense of dread. But where the documentary-style “United 93” refused to let us off that doomed plane – and forced us to confront our worst fears – “WTC” takes the more conventional and audience-friendly Hollywood route and repeatedly cuts away to McLoughlin and Jimeno’s agonized families in the suburbs.
Though Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal are beyond reproach as the men’s wives (the latter six months pregnant, the former struggling to hold it together) and screenwriter Andrea Berloff reportedly drew heavily on interviews with the families, these scenes unavoidably have a slight whiff of a Lifetime movie about them.
Far more gripping are the dimly lit, war-movie-inspired sequences of the entombed officers, waiting anxiously for rescue as they helplessly face flaming debris and bullets discharged by an overheated service revolver, while Jimeno tries to coax a few drops of water from a twisted pipe.
Mostly they fight to keep each from succumbing to the excruciating pain, with these relatively inarticulate working-class heroes talking haltingly about movies, TV, their families and their faith (though literally depicting Jimeno’s hallucination of Jesus is a bit much).
Among the platoon of excellent character actors in small roles, the one who stands out is Michael Shannon as David Karnes, a Connecticut accountant who put on his old Marine uniform on 9/11, drove to Ground Zero, and began his own personal rescue mission.
It was largely thanks to Karnes’ determination in the darkened ruins (stunningly recreated on a Los Angeles soundstage) that Jimeno and McLoughlin ultimately became the 18th and 19th of just 20 survivors pulled from the rubble where thousands perished.
Karnes, who the end-credits tell us re-enlisted and served two tours in Iraq, is a commanding figure, even though he has been equipped with some florid speeches that seem at odds with Berloff’s no-nonsense script.
The scene of McLoughlin being passed on a stretcher by rescue workers (many of them real-life heroes playing themselves) does not really to be punctuated by Karnes’ gung-ho declaration that “they’re going to need some good men to avenge this.”
While my eyes began to mist up here and there, it was manipulative moments like this (and Craig Armstrong’s occasionally intrusive score) that kept me from losing it at “World Trade Center” the way I did with “United 93.”
