Oliver Stone (2006)

In the opening scenes of World Trade Center, New York City, as photographed by Seamus McGarvey, looks beautiful – prelapsarian – in the early morning sun of 9/11.  Even the shots of street life that appear in so many New York films are poignant because we know what’s coming.  This being an Oliver Stone picture, the images are, however, too emphatic:  they’re in your face rather than glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.  It’s almost a relief that 08:48 hours arrives so soon:  9/11 is too vast to be subjected to the grim suspense of extended it-was-just-another-day-until treatment.  World Trade Center focuses on two of the last people to be rescued alive from the ruins of the Twin Towers – police officers of the NY Port Authority called John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno.  Complaints were made at the time of their release that this film and United ’93 had been made with indecent haste after the event.   In theory, these movies, whatever the motives for making them, might have helped audiences learn more about their own feelings about the events described.  In fact, most of the people in the Richmond Odeon where we saw World Trade Center were on their feet as soon as the images stopped and the list of the names of the dead from 9/11 appeared on the screen.  I doubt this was because they couldn’t cope with the strength of their emotions.  It may seem unfair to blame Oliver Stone for audience insensitivity but his staging is so deliberate – so lacking in any fluidity or documentary feel – that the contrasts with the actual events we see on TV screens everywhere during the picture are jarring.  The real thing is being juxtaposed with, and seems disconnected from, forced, clichéd melodrama.  It’s the clumsiness of the film-making – rather than the fact of a film about 9/11 being made so soon after the event – that’s offensive.

It should have been possible to make us feel that, in witnessing the experience of McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s families, we were seeing what so many families went through in New York on 9/11.  As it is, we soon seem to be in generic territory:  a picture about two people trapped in physically perilous conditions and a familiar partnership – a responsible, wary veteran (McLoughlin) and a keen, more impulsive youngster (Jimeno).  When their loved ones are assured that the men have been rescued and that they’re OK, you know it can’t be as a simple as that because there’s more than half an hour still to go and this false dawn is part of a formula.  Thus do Oliver Stone and the screenwriter Andrea Berloff manage to make a true story (a true story like no other in our time) unbelievable.  The music by Craig Armstrong doesn’t help in that you’ve also heard this kind of score – portentously tragic, shot through with notes of hopefulness, and duly flowering into triumph-of-the-human-spirit plenitude – often before.  The film is occasionally moving – but this is only because Stone and Berloff can rely on the viewer to supply a deeper context for the mechanical dramatisation.

Nicolas Cage is McLoughlin:  he looks gaunt and careworn from the word go and, in his early scenes, registers strongly as a man who’s as humourless as he’s hard-working.   We root more for Michael Peña’s Jimeno once the Towers fall.  The best performance comes from Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Jimeno’s pregnant wife Allison.  Gyllenhaal’s height and physicality make her well equipped to convey Allison’s claustrophobia in the world above the rubble.  She has a fine moment when their young daughter asks if her father is coming back and there’s a pause before Allison says she doesn’t know and watches for the child’s reaction with a horrified curiosity.  Maria Bello is Mrs McLoughlin.  Stephen Dorff plays an ex-marine involved in helping with the rescue effort:  this expressionist study of a vengeful fundamentalist Christian soul is especially crude and unconvincing.  The characterisations of the other rescuers are pretty perfunctory.

29 October 2006