Claiming issue movie

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Oliver Stone has probed everything from the Vietnam War to the Nixon White House to the JFK assassination in his provocative films.

But with World Trade Center, which some may have thought would be an investigation into the reasons behind the attacks on New York's twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, he is on almost spiritual ground. From tragedy in one of America's darkest hours, Stone has mined great emotional feelings and a surprising spirit of triumph as he explores the depths of love and human bonding.

Rather than being exploitive, Stone cautiously refrains from showing us the planes hitting the towers. At one point there's the sound of a jet plane zooming in low overhead and its shadow. But his film, with a script by Andrea Berloff, is not about the attacks, but about the aftermath felt by the victims and their families. For such a grand-scale event, World Trade Center is a surprisingly personal film, concentrating as it does on 2 of the only 20 survivors to be pulled from the wreckage of the shattered buildings.

Not that Stone has ignored the bigger picture. Through computer imagery, we do see the towers in the distance hours before the attacks as a group of Port Authority policemen head off to work on the morning of Sept. 11, just another ordinary day that would soon become extraordinary. Footage of the burning buildings and their collapse is kept to a minimum, although there is an image of a falling man who has leaped from the conflagration. Most of the footage was taken from TV news programs that were broadcast that day.

By focusing on two men — Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and rookie Patrolman Will Jimeno (Michael Pea) — and their close-knit families, Stone brings the day's tragedy into close-up so we can see how it so deeply affected the lives of these people and, by extension, so many other lives. Late in the film, as some of the characters peer at the faces of the missing whose pictures are hanging on the walls of a hospital corridor, we realize how much has been lost and how many lives have been altered by the events of one sunny September morning.

McLoughlin is a no-nonsense guy who sends his cops out on duty at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street with the advice, "As always, protect yourselves, watch each other's backs." He had no idea how that homey warning would play out over the next several hours when the call came to head for downtown.

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At the time, when they commandeer a city bus to take them downtown, they know a plane has crashed into the building, but reports are still sketchy. What they find is a vision out of hell, a war zone with the walking wounded making their way out of the building. In one brief shot, Stone shows us the cops' trepidation: feelings of awe at the raging fire above; the dread of having to make it up so many floors to help save the wounded as survivors dazedly walk past.

They never make it up. Chunks of the building begin crashing down from above and, while on the concourse level that runs between the twin towers, one of the buildings collapses in a scene of great fury. McLoughlin and Jimeno are buried under the rubble, trapped by smashed concrete and fallen girders.

Amazingly, they are alive, but just barely. Separated by the debris and unable to see each other, they talk to each other, trying to keep each other from falling asleep, which they fear could lead to death.

Stone has given us the full horror of the situation. Yet, knowing that you can't hold an audience by close-ups of two men in distress for an hour, he wisely uses flashbacks and sequences that revolve around the men's worried families hoping for the best on the homefront. These sequences — with Maggie Gyllenhaal as the pregnant Allison Jimeno and Maria Bello as Donna McLoughlin, plus their respective hovering families — give World Trade Center its emotional edge. It gives the trapped men background stories and makes them very real figures.

Gyllenhaal rides the roller coaster of emotion from dread to dazed numbness to a sense of unbounded hope that will have the audience riding the ups and downs with her, feeling emotionally drained in the end.

Bello, by contrast, tries to be the rock to her four distressed children, toughing out the situation and trying not to let emotions show. When she later explodes at a policewoman who has given her wrong information, we finally understand the rage she has had bottled up inside.

As for Cage and Pea, they have the difficult task of submerging their darkest fears in a spirit of brotherly camaraderie as they try to keep each other's spirit alive while in the dark and many feet apart. Fortunately, we see their home lives in flashbacks so we know how important these men are to the fabric of their families.

To remind us of how dire their situation, every now and then another section of building will fall in near them and, to keep things really frightening, fireballs from nowhere shoot past them, their intense heat setting off a gun with the bullets ricocheting around them.

In one startling moment, the camera pans up from McLoughlin and Pea, through the rubble and up to an overview of the World Trade Center site. It continues higher and higher, up to an orbiting satellite which is broadcasting news of the tragedy around the world. Stone shows the world's reaction that day as people huddled around TVs and radios to hear the news with sadness.

One of them is a former Marine in Wilton, Conn., who is spurred by the day's events to take it upon himself to head for lower Manhattan to help. Michael Shannon plays Dave Karnes as rather squirrelly, gung-ho and caught up in playing soldier/rescuer. He seems, in contrast to the rather deliberate performances of everyone else, a little beyond strange. But then this is a movie where a beatific Jesus Christ appears — and twice — in a bright light, complete with blazing Sacred Heart.

When you're going for emotion — and World Trade Center has emotion in spades — Jesus certainly fills the bill. By the time Stone's film ends, you may be in tears.

mjanuson@projo.com

/ (401) 277-7276

****

World Trade Center

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Michael Pea, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Stephen Dorff, Jay Hernandez, Michael Shannon.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, profanity.