WTC Appeals to Heart, Not Mind

“World Trade Center”

Directed by Oliver Stone

Paramount Pictures

2.5 Stars


After over a decade of unremarkable films, Oliver Stone has finally returned to his old stomping grounds—romanticized historical tragedy—and made a powerful movie that portrays pain and suffering in his usual forceful style.

Unfortunately, while “World Trade Center,” Stone’s meditation on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, may have ample emotional oomph, it lacks the incisive moral commentary of his classic “Platoon.”

Instead, Stone and first-time screenwriter Andrea Berloff’s efforts to humanize 9/11 are tainted by a sense of crass opportunism, which Paul Greengrass was able to avoid in this year’s “United 93.”

“World Trade Center” is moving, to be sure, but rarely in ways that don’t feel like cheap shots tugging at well-worn American heartstrings (and wallets), which may explain why Stone’s 9/11 film feels unnecessarily exhausting while Greengrass’ doesn’t.

In their defense, the still-recent proximity to 9/11 largely neuters Stone and Berloff’s ability to use the event to make a statement like the one Stone made in “Platoon,” lest they appear disrespectful. This is a film that opens its mouth to speak, but instead of words, all that comes out is a soul-piercing, over-rehearsed scream.

The actors themselves emit plenty of these screams throughout the film. Port Authority Police officers John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) are trapped in the mezzanine level when the towers collapse, buried underneath 20 feet of concrete for nearly a day with only their pain to keep them awake and alive.

Since the film is, according to the production notes, “based on the true life events” of these men, it’s hard to say what actually happened and what’s Hollywood fiction, but the moment fireballs go whizzing past Jimeno’s face (against gravity, no less), I begin to wonder how many liberties Berloff took with her script.

Cage and Peña’s performances generally stay within the realm of plausible reality, but they are upstaged by the intense and believable portrayals of their wives, Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The film’s sense of anguish comes from scenes of uncertain waiting, where these women wonder if their husbands met the same fate as hundreds of other rescue workers when the towers collapsed.

Unfortunately, Stone rarely deviates from cutting back and forth between the officers screaming and their wives worrying. Aside from a few token scenes showing other Americans supposedly feeling New Yorkers’ pain, he does little to paint a portrait of national anxiety and, eventually, unity.

Of course, Americans today know exactly how they felt and exactly where they were when they heard the towers had gone down. While the film is a panegyric to the courageous souls of the McLoughlin and Jimeno families, it says almost nothing about how the collective American soul changed on 9/11.

Consequently, the climactic image of two Port Authority officers emerging from their claustrophobic sepulcher doesn’t feel like the removal of a national sword in the stone—it doesn’t even feel like consolation for traumatized New Yorkers. When McLoughlin and Jimeno rise from the ashes, America does not.

The only bond Americans will share after seeing “World Trade Center” is reunification in suffering and fear, a part of the 9/11 legacy that, while unforgotten, fails to speak to the nationalist upheaval in the years that followed and is all too easy to exploit at the box office.

—Reviewer Kyle L. K. McAuley can be reached at kmcauley@fas.harvard.edu.