Stone Cold Sombre

The sky is falling: Nicholas Cage (center right) and Michael Pena (left) play two real-life Port Authority policemen who were trapped in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Photo: François Duhamel. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The only plane in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center appears as a massive shadow passing across a wall of the Port Authority. The silhouette briefly catches the eye of a police officer who glances up, then continues his job of moving bums along and keeping watch for lost kids.

So this is a disaster movie where the central disaster — two hijacked planes flying into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 — is never shown, except through the numbing television footage that flutters in every corner of every room. Instead, Stone cleaves to the true story of two Port Authority police officers trapped in the rubble, leaving out the conspiracy theories and the bombast (see: JFK, Nixon) that are, for better or worse, his signature. Working from someone else’s script (Andrea Berloff’s) for a change, Stone is liberated from his own skepticism and forced to scale back after the disastrous overreaching of Alexander. Focus is good, but as the violin-heaving, feel-good averageness of World Trade Center plugs ably along, the stilling of Oliver Stone, something that sounds like a good idea, begins to seem a little sad. What film needs now — particularly around this volatile subject — is more ambition, not less. It’s disorienting to watch Stone so casually apolitical, helming a decent, handsome film more interested in human kindness than the motivations for evil — a film, in other words, by Ron Howard.

World Trade Center’s hailed hero is Sgt. John McLoughlin, played by Nicolas Cage, trying his best to hide his inner action hero behind thinning hair and a somber authority, though when briefly caught post-shower, he reveals abs that could only be obtained in a CAA-brokered deal with the devil. On the morning of Sept. 11, McLoughlin stands in front of his men and takes roll call. Nothing has happened yet, but these officers — mostly Latino, many young, wrapped in blue collars — look eager and vulnerable, their guns and hats inadequate for what’s to come. In what is, in many ways a horror movie, I expected Stone to struggle with the question: how do you create suspense when the outcome is certain? But in fact, the suspense is actually intensified because we know. The real question Stone faces, then, is: will it be too much to bear?

The film is visceral and upsetting, but it is not exploitative. When the first shudder shakes the Port Authority, police officers stumble and right themselves, and someone asks: “What the hell was that?” It’s a bittersweet joke, a disaster movie cliché reminding us that before 9/11, horror was the stuff of entertainment. Back then, the answer would have been a superhero or a dinosaur, a monster with a name. World Trade Center rocks our expectations as it careens back and forth between movie conventions and the holy-shit reality that is somehow, even five years later, more unbelievable than fiction.

McLoughlin gathers a team and co-opts a city bus to go into the flames while the rest of Manhattan heads the other way. This first part of the film is the strongest, a meticulous process piece showing the great, semi-doomed rescue machine lumber to life. Officers calmly gather gear, get orders and ready for their work, which they think will be rescuing people. There is no panic — these are professionals — but there is fear, broadcast only in the turn of a head or the ashen look across the face of rookie Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) as a bus window frames an early casualty: a dead man on the street, possibly a heart attack victim, being tended to by bewildered passers-by.

Waiting for a miracle: Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhall) tries to find out what happened to her husband. Photo: François Duhamel. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

The police, known as “first responders,” are at the mercy of misinformation. Because they are first, no one knows anything yet. When one cop reports that his wife has called on his cell phone to tell him a local radio station is reporting the second tower hit, another cop is incredulous: “Who gets their news from Hot 97?” Anyone who was awake that morning remembers the deep, dislocating sensation of “This is impossible,” a refrain beautifully telegraphed on the faces of these cops.

Instead of going high for the inevitable money shot of the towers crumbling, Stone takes a new perspective, staying low, right up under the bones of buildings to show what it felt like on the inside. From the TV images, the collapse almost looked soft; a weeping mother in World Trade Center describes the towers as “folding like pancakes.” Such is the lie of television with its miniaturizing effect. On the movie screen, the collapse is loud and ugly, steel twisting in flames and tree-sized slabs of concrete spinning like tops. But there is no time to confuse this havoc with a Vin Diesel movie before the screen turns to black. When the light cracks, McLoughlin and Jimeno are pinned 20 feet down in the rubble, and there they stay, trying to keep each other awake and alive.

Stone has always had a romantic affinity for the working man, and he loves the average guy talk between these two men, a pain-soaked conversation that bounces between GI Jane and how much they love their wives. Screenwriter Berloff worked closely with the families to fashion a realistic version of events, and the plainspoken exchanges feel true, up until a Jesus hallucination that could have been a peyote moment from The Doors (just because it happened doesn’t make it art).

Above ground, the wives (Maggie Gyllenhaal and a distractingly botoxed Maria Bello) are waiting, gathering their children and falling apart as little as possible. But nothing in the actresses’ effortful performances comes close to conveying the tortures those women must have gone through. They gnash and nail-bite with as little insight into their trauma as the waiting wives in a one-hour TV police procedural.

In the great debate over the function of art after a disaster of this scale, the critical consensus always seems to be: if it is sincere and tells us something new about the truth of the horror, then put it out there. United 93, the much lauded, more experimental 9/11 movie, satisfied that critical agenda, but audiences stayed away. Glossy and sentimental, World Trade Center clearly aspires to a mass audience. I cannot imagine anyone being offended by it, and that’s too bad. What makes even Stone’s most abrasive, morally muddled films, like Natural Born Killers, worth watching is that they are such mad middle-fingers, pleased to offend. Adolescent rebellion is Stone’s worst flaw, of course, but sometimes the brio pays off: Platoon’s gyroscopic camera freak-out was a perfect match for Vietnam’s chaos. No such risks are taken in World Trade Center. There is no mention of terrorists or the U.S. government; instead of a position, we get the no-argument-here theory that evil acts can inspire a torrent of humanity worthy of our awe. Yep. 'S true!

Much of the film’s $63-million budget seems to have gone to debris and high-tech super-authentic filth, and yet, World Trade Center is sanitized, clean and sensitive to the point of dullness. It toes the party line — something Stone has always been loath to do — that anyone associated with 9/11 is automatically a hero or a saint. But honour is complicated and dirty, isn’t it? Just like war. And didn’t we learn that from Oliver Stone?

World Trade Center opens Aug. 9 across the country.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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