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Pinned Under the Weight of Skyscrapers and History in 'World Trade Center'

By A.O. Scott

Aug. 9, 2006

How will Hollywood respond? This question began to surface not long after the Sept. 11 attacks — shockingly soon after, if memory serves.

It was impossible to banish the thought, even in the midst of that day’s horror and confusion, that the attacks themselves represented a movie scenario made grotesquely literal. What other frame of reference did we have for burning skyscrapers and commandeered airplanes? And then our eyes and minds were so quickly saturated with the actual, endlessly replayed images — the second plane’s impact; the plumes of smoke coming from the tops of the twin towers; the panicked citizens covered in ash — that the very notion of a cinematic reconstruction seemed worse than redundant. Nobody needed to be told that this was not a movie. And at the same time nobody could doubt that, someday, it would be.

And now, as the fifth anniversary approaches, it is. For a while a lot of movies seemed to deal with 9/11 obliquely or allegorically. But Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” rather than digging for meanings and metaphors, represent a return to the literal.

Both films revisit the immediate experience of Sept. 11, staking out a narrow perspective and filling it with maximum detail. Mr. Stone, much of whose film takes place at ground zero, does not share Mr. Greengrass’s clinical, quasi-documentary aesthetic. His sensibility is one of visual grandeur, sweeping emotion and heightened, sometimes overwrought, drama.

There are many words a critic might use to describe Mr. Stone’s films — maddening, brilliant, irresponsible, provocative, long — but subtle is unlikely to be on the list. Which makes him the right man for the job, since there was nothing subtle about the emotions of 9/11. Later there would be complications, nuances, gray areas, as the event and its aftermath were inevitably pulled into the murky, angry swirl of American politics. But that is territory Mr. Stone, somewhat uncharacteristically, avoids.

“World Trade Center” is only the second film, after “U Turn,” that he has directed entirely from someone else’s script, and Andrea Berloff’s screenplay, her first to be produced, imposes a salutary discipline on some of the director’s wilder impulses. The unruly intellectual ambitions that animate both Mr. Stone’s most vigorous work — “Platoon,” “Wall Street,” “J.F.K.” — and his woolliest — “Alexander,” “Natural Born Killers” — may be held in check here, but the sober carefulness of this project nonetheless highlights some of his strengths as a filmmaker.

There is really no other American director who can move so swiftly and emphatically from intimate to epic scale, saturating even quiet moments with fierce emotion. He edits like a maestro conducting Beethoven, coaxing images and sequences into a state of agitated eloquence.

Ms. Berloff’s script is composed in the key of strong, simple feeling, and brought to life with vivid clarity by Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography. “World Trade Center” is, from the first frame to last, almost unbearably moving. It could hardly be otherwise, given the facts of the story and the memories it will stir up.

The movie concentrates on two Port Authority police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were trapped deep in the rubble of the collapsed towers, where they had gone to help with the evacuation after the first plane hit. Starting before dawn on Sept. 11 and covering roughly the next 24 hours, the narrative switches back and forth from the men to their families, in particular the wives, who spend agonized hours waiting for news of their husbands’ fates.

Sergeant McLoughlin, played by Nicolas Cage, has a quiet, watchful air. A veteran of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he rushes into the breach on 9/11 knowing that no adequate plan exists to deal with a catastrophe of this magnitude. Jimeno (Michael Peña), a rookie, is eager and a little anxious; his face registers his desire to prove himself on the job and also distinct shadings of fear — both the worry that he’ll mess up and, as the hours go by, a much deeper terror.

Pinned under tons of smashed masonry and twisted metal, they keep talking to each other to keep despair and sleep at bay, and you get the sense that it’s their first real conversation, an exchange of commonplaces in the face of death. McLoughlin and his wife, Donna (Maria Bello), have four children; Jimeno and his wife, Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), are expecting their second, and as the two men talk, the banalities of domestic life take on an almost sacred cast.

In an Oliver Stone film actors are well advised to bring their own nuances, and the delicacy and insight of the performances in “World Trade Center” complement the director’s bold brushstrokes. Ms. Bello reveals Donna’s toughness without overstating it, while Ms. Gyllenhaal suggests a complicated, prickly personality underneath the panic and grief.

Mr. Cage turns all his intensity inward, playing a man who can be a little self-conscious about his own reticence. (“People don’t like me because I don’t smile a lot,” he says.) He looks older and more worn than he has in other films, and he wears his character’s tired stoicism like an old shirt.

Mr. Peña, who played the good-hearted locksmith in “Crash,” is friendlier and jumpier; Jimeno slips naturally into the role of McLoughlin’s talkative kid brother. the temperamental contrast between the two actors keeps the movie going through its long, difficult middle stretch.

Both the officers and their wives spend most of “World Trade Center” in different states of paralysis. The men are physically immobilized, while the women, surrounded by well-meaning friends and family, can neither help their husbands nor learn for sure what has happened to them. And so they sit stricken, by the telephone or in front of the television, as a maelstrom of hectic activity engulfs New York and its environs.

It is this combination of frantic action with stunned, shocked impotence that “World Trade Center” most effectively reproduces. The details are all in place — the office paper falling like snow; the voices of Tom Brokaw and Aaron Brown extemporizing a collective interpretation of something no one could have imagined; the briefly glimpsed faces of George W. Bush and Rudolph W. Giuliani projecting leadership from the television screen — but the point of the movie is not so much to construct a visual replica as to immerse you, once again, in shock, terror, rage and sorrow. And also in the solidarity and concern — the love — that were part of 9/11.

The movie is not only about the victims of the attack and their families, but also about their rescuers, notably David Karnes (Michael Shannon), who leaves his office job in Connecticut, puts on his Marine Corps uniform and slips into ground zero to search for survivors. Karnes is the only character in the film who looks past the smoke and suffering and articulates a desire for revenge.

But Mr. Stone and Ms. Berloff, like Mr. Greengrass, keep their distance from post- — or, for that matter, pre- — 9/11 politics. The two men buried under the Trade Center don’t even know what brought it down, and everyone else is much too busy to begin learning the exotic vocabulary we would all eventually acquire. This movie has nothing to say about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda or jihad. That comes later.

In the Sept. 11 of “World Trade Center,” feeling transcends politics, and the film’s astonishingly faithful re-creation of the emotional reality of the day produces a curious kind of nostalgia. It’s not that anyone would wish to live through such agony again, but rather that the extraordinary upsurge of fellow feeling that the attacks produced seems precious. And also very distant from the present. Mr. Stone has taken a public tragedy and turned it into something at once genuinely stirring and terribly sad. His film offers both a harrowing return to a singular, disastrous episode in the recent past and a refuge from the ugly, depressing realities of its aftermath.

“World Trade Center” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has scenes of extreme, upsetting violence, most of which reproduce images that were originally seen on television during daylight hours.

WORLD TRADE CENTER

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Oliver Stone; written by Andrea Berloff, based on the true stories of John and Donna McLoughlin and William and Allison Jimeno; director of photography, Seamus McGarvey; edited by David Brenner and Julie Monroe; music by Craig Armstrong; production designer, Jan Roelfs; produced by Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, Moritz Borman and Debra Hill; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 129 minutes.

WITH: Nicolas Cage (John McLoughlin), Michael Peña (Will Jimeno), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno), Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin), Stephen Dorff (Scott Strauss), Jay Hernandez (Dominick Pezzulo) and Michael Shannon (Dane Karnes).

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World Trade Center

Two Port Authority police officers become trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center. Two Port Authority police officers become trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center. Two Port Authority police officers become trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center.

Oliver Stone
Andrea Berloff
John McLoughlin
Donna McLoughlin
Nicolas Cage
Michael Peña
Maria Bello
630 User reviews
162 Critic reviews
66 Metascore
4 wins & 12 nominations

Top cast 99+

Will Jimeno

Allison Jimeno

Steven McLoughlin

JJ McLoughlin

Erin McLoughlin

Caitlin McLoughlin

Antonio Rodrigues

Dominick Pezzulo
Subway Rider

Christopher Amoroso

Port Authority Officer
(as Will Jimeno)

Lieutenant Kassimatis

Inspector Fields

Homeless Addict #1
Homeless Addict #2
Street Hood #1
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Trivia The city of New York absolutely prohibited the recreation of 9/11 destruction or chaos on location. The filmmakers were not even allowed to film actors looking upward toward where the towers would be. The drive of the officers up to the site was permitted to be filmed, but all scenes depicting events at or near the WTC were filmed in Los Angeles.
Goofs (at around 35 mins) There is a brief scene set in Hong Kong, where locals are stunned by what they see happening in New York on TV. The background clearly shows that it is daytime. However, when the 9/11 events occurred, it was night time in Hong Kong.

Will Jimeno : Where did that wind come from all the sudden, Sarge?

John McLoughlin : I don't know.

Will Jimeno : The fire just goes out like that, Sarge! Why is that?

John McLoughlin : I don't know!

Will Jimeno : You're not a big talker, are you?

John McLoughlin : No!

Will Jimeno : Well gee, you gotta talk to me 'cause...

John McLoughlin : Aaaahhhh! Aaaahhhh! Aaaahhhh! Aah! I can't 'cause my knees are crushed again! That's why I can't fucking talk!

Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: World Trade Center/Step Up/Scoop/Half Nelson (2006)
Soundtracks Only in America by Kix Brooks , Don Cook & Randall Rogers Performed by Brooks & Dunn Courtesy of Arista Records By Arrangement with SONY BMG Music Entertainment