"World Trade Center"

Oliver Stone tackles the most harrowing shared experience of our lives -- and it's not the disaster you would expect.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Oliver Stone, Movies, Nicolas Cage, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Nicholas Cage in "World Trade Center."

Aug. 9, 2006 | When Oliver Stone thinks, which is possibly not that often, his ideas take the form of gargantuan footsteps. He maps the dimensions of his giant subjects -- the death of JFK, the fall of Nixon, the sprawling ambitions of Alexander the Great -- with a confident, rolling stride. Even if his pictures don't deliver on the greatness they promise, at least their bravado is something to behold, like fraudulent Bigfoot tracks stamped out by a guy with a massive fake foot nailed to the end of a stick.

I doubt anyone was surprised when Stone announced he was going to make a movie about 9/11: It's the kind of mountain-size subject that he just can't resist scaling. "World Trade Center" focuses on the horrific experiences of two real-life Port Authority cops, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were trapped in the rubble of the collapsed towers, and the anxiety suffered by their families on that day.

In some ways, it's a typically unsubtle Stone movie. Stone can't show New Yorkers (civilians as well as firefighters, policemen and Marines) helping one another through the disaster without later adding a voiceover about how everyone helped each other that day. An early sequence in which inexperienced but dedicated young cops show up at the Twin Towers in the early minutes of the disaster captures the anxious uncertainty on their faces. But Stone also has to insert a shot of a body falling from one of the upper floors, as if the sudden shock on the young cops' faces needed explanation. It doesn't. Over and over in "World Trade Center," Stone acknowledges the importance of showing, as opposed to telling, and then goes ahead and tells anyway. Scene by scene, the picture is practically a treatise on how good instincts can be overridden by bad judgment.

But if movies about 9/11 have to be made at all -- and no one has yet answered the question, for me, at least, of why we should need or want them just yet -- the approach Stone takes with "World Trade Center" certainly isn't the worst kind. The picture doesn't beat you up, like Paul Greengrass' scrupulously made "United 93," a movie that scraped at our feelings of dread and sorrow as we fixated on the experiences of people we knew were going to die. "United 93" is the kind of harrowing moviegoing experience that's supposed to make us feel like better people for having suffered through it. Greengrass didn't want to exploit his subject, and he took the utmost care in every aspect of the filmmaking. But "United 93" was the most punishing movie I've ever seen, not an example of art offering transcendence or deeper understanding, but of picking at a wound that hadn't yet scabbed over. Greengrass approached his subject with a you-are-there immediacy, while Stone settles for old-fashioned dramatization, which may be more honorable. Even when Stone is clumsy, he at least seems to recognize that he can't possibly re-create the experience of these policemen: The best he can do is put it onstage, reminding us that this happened to someone else and not to us.

McLoughlin and Jimeno were two of five Port Authority officers who entered the World Trade Center just before the collapse. All were trapped when the towers fell; the other three officers were killed, but McLoughlin and Jimeno survived, buried for 12 hours under chunks of concrete laced with twisted metal. "World Trade Center" focuses on their experience, enfolding the stories of what their wives and families suffered as they waited for news of their men.

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