Movie Review: World Trade Centre

Movie Review By Peter Travers

Oliver Stone has made a cautious, earnestly factual and emotionally unassailable film about two Port Authority cops, Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) and John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), who were among the last of the twenty survivors pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11. What he has not made is an Oliver Stone movie.

Good news for those opposed to seeing an inspiring true story in the hands of a nut-job conspiracy theorist (JFK, Nixon). But for those of us who recognize the rigorous talent in Stone (Platoon, Salvador) as well as his reckless abuse of it (Natural Born Killers, Alexander), there's little joy in seeing him morph into Ron Howard to play it safe at the box office.

Much has already been made of the fact that Paramount, the studio releasing World Trade Center, has hired Creative Response Concepts to curry favor for the film among conservatives and the Christian right. It seems to be working. Bad boy Stone is earning raves from right-wing pundits who once would have merrily burned him at the stake.

Is Stone going soft to revive his flagging career? Only in the sense that there's no politics in World Trade Center, except for the marketing, and that the trapped cops never curse their fates, and every American on view behaves honorably.

Though Stone has cleaned up his act, there is still a fire in him to italicize the profound significance of this intimate story. In one of the film's rare showoff shots, Stone and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours) have the camera rise from the rubble to take in the Manhattan skyline and then up and up till it reaches a satellite beaming the news that will shake the world.

Still, it's in the smaller moments that the film shines. Stone's focus on the men in the rubble is characteristically intense. And the actors perform beyond the call of duty. Cage is riveting and resonant as Sgt. McLoughlin , a veteran cop who has spent a dozen years patrolling the towers, though nothing, not even the 1993 bombing, has prepped him for this. He and his team of four volunteers, including Jimeno -- Pena delivers on his breakthrough in Crash with a performance of grit and grace -- are there to help. But how?

The question becomes moot when both are trapped under an avalanche of concrete and steel, barely able to move in a confined space. Lesser actors would be daunted by the task of conveying emotional nuance in the dark, immobile and covered with ash. But Cage and Pena rise to the challenge as McLoughlin and Jimeno keep themselves awake -- sleep could lead to coma and death -- by trading stories even as the hope of rescue fades. Jimeno, who has visions of Jesus, tells of wanting to be a cop since he was a kid watching Starsky and Hutch on the tube. Later, both men hum the show's jaunty theme to break the tension. The telling details -- McLoughlin's tardiness in building a kitchen for his wife, Donna (a quietly devastating Maria Bello), Jimeno arguing about baby names with his pregnant wife, Allison (a tightly wound Maggie Gyllenhaal) -- become a lifeline.

Stone cuts from the men to their families at home, waiting for news, any news.
This material could have played like a by-the-numbers docudrama. But the script, by newcomer Andrea Berloff, who worked with both couples to get the details right, has the sting of reality to work against any sugarcoating. For the rescue (the set was built in Playa Vista, California), Stone used medics and firefighters who were actually on the scene.

Among the actors, Stephen Dorff scores as EMS officer Scott Strauss. And Michael Shannon is indelible in the incredible role of Staff Sgt. David Karnes, a former Marine who quits his accounting job on a call from God to head for Ground Zero.

If Stone overdoes the rah-rah, it's hard to blame him. The film is a salute to heroes who could have easily walked away. Unlike Paul Greengrass' piercing United 93, which detailed the events of 9/11 with potent provocation, World Trade Center takes the point of view of two men with no clear idea of what's going on. "What happened to the buildings?" asks Jimeno when his rescuers lift him out of the hole. The deeper implications of those words raise hot-button issues that Stone has tabled for now. His film is undeniably affecting, but you leave it wanting more.
PETER TRAVERS

The Art of Filmmaking

Sensitive Touches Behind World Trade Centre

It isn’t easy to be rescued – Oliver Stone

We consume movies the way we eat popcorn – without even looking. What we want is a warm, salty, crunchy taste in our mouths, and a bracing cold Coke to wash it down with. But the amount of sensitivity, care and intelligence that goes into a motion picture is not only inspiring in itself, but staggering in some cases.

I have, in my own efforts at filmmaking, spent many agonizing hours just to perfect the opening 10-20 seconds of a film. From that perspective, one can begin to appreciate the months that go into the making of a few minutes of commercial motion pictures. And not only is time a factor, but millions of dollars are spent, and hundreds of lives, and hopes, are put on the line to produce one thing: One film. In the history of filmmaking, World Trade Centre was probably one of these most difficult movies to make.

We had to make the film authentic, but not so authentic that it would be impossible to watch – Oliver Stone

I recently watched World Trade Centre on DVD 3 times in a row. The 2nd and 3rd times were to follow the voiceovers of the real people behind the movie, and also the director’s, Oliver Stone’s, comments.
It is interesting to hear William Jimeno speak about what really happened. He is in some ways far more articulate than Oliver Stone. But then he is a native New Yorker. Oliver Stone’s voice at times reminds me of Nick Nolte’s gravel, and other times, Sir Anthony Hopkins’ steely intelligent tone. What struck me profoundly is the connection Stone feels to the whole human condition. I think many times the audience forgets that. The audience tends to fixate on a particular character, or enjoy a stunt, or gets carried away by romance or action. But all the time, the director is digging much deeper, using color and light, tone and context, to tell many more stories. This is the art of filmmaking, and sadly, many of us don’t see it.

I remember as a young boy, when video was just coming out, my brother and I would record simple sitcoms, sometimes movies too, and watch them over and over and over again. We’d tape over the less good stuff. What emerged though was that once you’d watched something a certain number of times, you began to read the actor’s minds, you began to clearly see the director’s hand, and remarkably, you noticed – if it was a good director – the many layers in a simple story, the incredible attention to detail and the many nuances that ordinary people often miss.

In World Trade Centre, there are cameos made by the heroes of 9/11, and in that sense, it is worth pausing to see who the real John McLoughlin was, for example.

Oliver Stone talks in a way that is different to most people. I’ve mentioned it before. It’s a right brain functionality. Sometimes it can appear incoherent. This incoherence is based on trying to find the exact words to match the vivid picture in the mind’s eye of the speaker. Sometimes these images reel by very quickly. Even though Stone conveys his images beautifully, he has learnt to speak succinctly too. At one point he says:
“If Aristotle was right and catharsis is truly, you know, this combination of pity, terror, fear, and crying is a cleansing of the soul, then this [film] is perhaps the love story that I always wanted to do [to please my mother].”

Imagine the pressure of taking on this most important cinematic journey, where every American is going to be yearning for their own take on 9/11. I know when I heard that Oliver Stone (who also made Platoon and Natural Born Killers) was going to make a movie on 9/11 I was immediately skeptical, immediately superstitious. Time has since passed, and proved he deserved the opportunity. Stone, a private man (he sees himself as a writer) needing to be private with his thoughts, does speak of the intense difficulties shooting the film, of the intense closeness with crowds of people. He says: “I’m sure the film is too dark for some, too hard, although many attacked us for being too easy.”

What shocked me is the intense, absolutely intense scrutiny that goes into a film like this. Even the very first scene, where John wakes up at 1 minute before 3:30am is meaningful. Stone explains that human trait we know so well. Where stress or tension has us wake up even before the alarm, even though we may be very tired. And do we see the significance that on this day, September 11, like so many days before, a man gets up and leaves without saying goodbye to his wife?

The art in this film is really what Stone describes as ‘the interplay of light’. He’s very descriptive of how the scenes were shot where the men were pinned down in the wreckage – he refers to them as holes – of the building: “…dark all day, smoke, certain tedium, the tightness, all these…” conveyed in a threadbare voice, in the hollow quiet of a prison cell, or the soft emptiness of the very early morning.

It is astonishing to see how the director is familiar with every detail of his story. He knows who everyone is, he knows when, where, how much. He is entirely familiar with his story. He must not only know reality, but how to render it. World Trade Centre had to be rendered in 2 hours – a 24 hour story. The artistry involved is compelling under these conditions, when most might try to adhere to a story, or try to be poignant in terms of sheer acting. Stone does both without getting bogged down, and goes further: he pokes into the human condition, that soft hot air balloon, and finds something special, something warm and valuable in it. Indeed, it’s the premise of the film.

At one point Stone says: “Here we leave [the dark of] hole 8 to go into the hospital light. We’ll use the full power of the fluorescents.” Once again, his visual brain, his thinking mechanism is beyond the ordinary skills of many writers and directors out there. Stone also describes the rescue line over the wreckage (survivors were recovered and conveyed over the wreckage on a sort of human conveyor belt), which consisted of firemen, FBI, port authority policemen, paramedics, marines etc as: “A true patch quilt of agencies combined.”

World Trade Centre is one story. One version. We see an interplay of light and dark, we see the approach of midnight. We see one survivor being rescued, and his companion more than 7 and a half hours later (just before 8am). Only 20 people were pulled out of the wrecked buildings alive. The film is just the story of number 18 and 19, and their wives and families. Stone uses an interesting turn of phrase to describe the second rescue: “We went to the more oblique and surreal…” We see Jesus and a bottle of water. And yet it all fits into the human condition.
And so only once John’s wife, Donna, has reached out to the world (she hugs and cries with a black woman at a hospital) is John allowed to be pulled out.

We’re told that this man, who did not say goodbye to his wife that morning, that it was his wife, the strength of his marriage, that compelled him to cling to life, as swarms of pain washed over his shattered body. Try to imagine what it is like to be crushed for hours in the dark. Stone says his favorite scene in the film, is what John (played by Nic Cage) says to his wife in the hospital.

We might ask ourselves, from time to time: What am I doing in this crazy world? Look a little closer. Understand the whole human condition, not just your own. When you watch a movie, look a little closer, and also, look at what you’re not looking at. And find the light. In life there are sometimes second chances for us. We can all learn from what has visited us, we can develop the sensitivity that goes deeply into every frame of the films we see, but then we need to put the blind man in ourselves to death, and be reborn into the light. These too, are visual lessons and metaphors for life. The human condition needs as much warm light as it can get for our hopes to float.