"World Trade Center"

McLoughlin, a sergeant, is played by Nicolas Cage, the go-to actor for roles that require a face capable of showing the weight of responsibility and honor. That face fills the job admirably here: And in most of Cage's scenes, we see nothing but that face; the rest of his body is hidden (and crushed) by debris. Michael Peña, in an ardent, earnest performance, plays Jimeno, a junior officer, who's similarly pinned several feet away: The men can hear, but not see, each other, and their conversation becomes the kind of essential connection that can make the difference between survival and death. The two talk about their families, about the day-to-day responsibilities that make up the fabric of their lives, although "fabric" is the highfalutin name for it -- it's really the kind of workaday crap that becomes inestimably precious when we think we'll never be able to do it again.

McLoughlin grouses about how his wife, Donna (Maria Bello), wanted a new kitchen, and so he's in the process of building one for her. "Right now she has no cabinets, and she's pissed," he tells Jimeno, in a voice that's becoming thick and heavy and weary, as if his lungs were learning to forget what oxygen is like. "So I gotta get outta here." Jimeno tells McLoughlin how he and his pregnant wife, Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), have been amiably arguing over baby names: He wants "Alyssa"; she wants "Olivia." He summons a quote from "G.I. Jane" -- "Pain is good; pain is your friend. If you can feel pain, you know you're alive" -- that's applicable to their predicament, and reminisces idly about how "Starsky & Hutch" made him want to be a cop. He even gets McLoughlin humming the show's theme song, and the moment is both funny and delicate, a reminder of the way dumb little details can take up permanent residence in our brains, and also of the way we inadvertently take life lessons from supposedly useless scraps of pop culture. In what could have turned out to be the hour of their death, McLoughlin and Jimeno find themselves humming the theme of a long-gone TV show.

The script was written by Andrea Berloff, adapted from the experiences of the McLoughlins and the Jimenos, and although it's sometimes believably casual, too often it hits with a clang -- particularly in the scenes in which a dutiful but nutso-looking accountant dons his old Marine uniform and heads to Ground Zero to help out. At one point this character, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), assesses the steaming ruins of the World Trade Center and intones, "Looks like God made a curtain with the smoke -- shield us from what we're not yet ready to see."

But Stone and his cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, do know how to use light -- and its absence -- to tell a story. The movie opens with scenes of the city slowly awakening on a very sunny late summer morning, showing how even the city that never sleeps has to stretch and yawn a little bit in preparation for the day ahead. The scenes in which the men lie trapped, talking to each other, occasionally screaming in pain and frustration, are the betrayed promise of that morning. The air in these scenes feels dense and convincingly claustrophobic; in the dim light of their treacherous prison, the men's dust-covered faces are chalky yet urgently distinct -- they're like gray-green ghosts trapped between this life and the next.

And when the action shifts aboveground, Stone and McGarvey show us how the outside world is no refuge from pain and uncertainty. Bello and Gyllenhaal are both terrific: As Allison Jimeno, Gyllenhaal transmits a fluttery nervousness that nonetheless has reserves of strength and resiliency at its core; Bello's Donna McLoughlin is the suburban mom who's usually pretty capable of holding everything together (she and her husband have four kids), but whose world threatens to crack when she realizes she might lose her husband. Bello's eyes have a softness that's inherently a little sad, as if the possibility of loss and sorrow were never very far away -- as if it were no surprise that she should so suddenly be put to the test, even as she can't quite reckon with the unfairness of it.

There's another actress in "World Trade Center" who doesn't get star billing, but who practically explodes the picture from within. In a very small part -- a scene with Bello -- Viola Davis plays a woman whose son works in the towers and who she fears is dead. She and Donna meet in the cafeteria of Bellevue Hospital, where the waiting families of some of the victims have been herded. The woman explains that her last encounter with her son had been a quarrel; he'd had to work late and had missed the dinner she'd cooked.

Davis has only a few lines, but her face is a map of grief; she's a country of one even in a world in which everyone, at one time or another, must feel pain.

"World Trade Center" is perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now. Dealing with the event directly is impossible; it's like staring at the sun. The only way we can truly get at it is to come at it sideways, as Spike Lee did in his ruggedly heartfelt "25th Hour," or as Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane does in "Superman Returns" when she asks the Man of Steel, "Where were you?" -- and nothing more, because what more does she need to say? Similarly, Davis is, strictly speaking, on the fringe of "World Trade Center." But she tells the whole story, and in less than five minutes. We're only just beginning to figure out how to translate the events of 9/11 into art. Viola Davis' face tells us that, right now, at least, we can't.

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