director
Oliver
Stone
screenwriter
Andrea
Berloff
producers
Moritz Borman
Debra Hill
Michael Shamberg
Stacey Sher
Oliver Stone
cinematographer
Seamus McGarvey
music
Craig Armstrong
editors
David Brenner
Julie Monroe
cast
Nicolas Cage (John McLoughlin)
Michael Peña (Will Jimeno)
Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno)
Jay Hernandez (Dominick Pezzulo)
Ned Eisenberg (Officer Polnicki)
Nicholas Turturro (Officer Colovito)
Patti D'Arbanville (Donna's Neighbor)
Nicky Katt (Volunteer Fireman)
Michael Shannon (Dave Karnes)
Julie Adams (Allison's Grandmother)
William Mapother (Marine Sgt. Thomas)
Stephen Dorff (Scott Strauss)
Frank Whaley (Chuck Sereika)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: 8/9/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other oliver
stone films
reviewed on this website:
- alexander
- any given sunday
- natural born
killers
- nixon
- u-turn
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In his long, antagonistic career,
Oliver Stone has never made a movie that I felt anyone else could've
directed -- until now. World Trade Center, which
has been treated to Saving Private Ryan-style
hype, is at least as manipulative and overrated as that film,
with a comparable attention to excruciating physical detail but
no particular reason to exist other than to garland itself with
medals for telling an Uplifting True Story About Good Men. I'll
be blunt: If not for the still-raw wound it probes -- if it were
simply about two men trapped under a collapsed building and awaiting
rescue, and carried none of our 9/11 associations -- World
Trade Center would be of very little dramatic interest. Viscerally,
in the early scenes, it brings 9/11 back to us with shocking
clarity -- the disbelief, the misinformation, the sinking feeling
when the second tower and the Pentagon were hit. After that,
though, it's not really a 9/11 film -- it focuses on two of the
few Americans that day who had no idea what happened until well
after the fact. Stone pays a price for staying away from politics
this time.
Working with a spindly script
by Andrea Berloff, Stone keeps his camera grounded and centered,
as if not only his attitude but his filmmaking were hemmed
in by the weight of recent history. No matter what his public
remarks to the contrary, the former controversialist behind JFK
and Natural Born Killers is being
a good boy here, going out of his way to show he can direct something
respectful and respectable. Maybe Stone, in his declining years,
is becoming less an iconoclast than an iconographer. His hero-worship
of machismo was obvious in his previous features, Any
Given Sunday (1999) and Alexander
(2004), and here he's got two men, New York Port Authority policemen
John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña),
whose courage none dares question.
But to question the movie that
enshrines them is not the same as impugning the men (who, by
all accounts, are humble and grateful to be alive). I'm sure
the real McLoughlin and Jimeno have some flaws, as we all do,
some quirks, things that set them apart. In the movie, they don't.
Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña do a lot with very little,
but it's not enough (and once the men are trapped under tons
of rubble, the script dooms the actors to repetition). Their
characters are written and acted with a nervous eye on the real
men and their families -- the filmmakers and actors go for a
kind of subdued heroism, but even that reduces any dramatic charge.
Stone has cast two of modern cinema's most idiosyncratic (and
best) actresses, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as the worried
wives of the men, and then gives them almost nothing to do but
fret and wait for news.
The ads for World Trade
Center announce the movie's purpose: to remind us there was
great good as well as great evil on that day. Stone chooses to
illuminate this (literally) with gauzy shots of Jesus himself
visiting the men in visions (though tauntingly holding a water
bottle), and a devout churchgoing Marine (Michael Shannon) is
the one who eventually finds the men. Move over, Mel Gibson:
Stone has stepped up to carry on the religious/cultural fight
-- Christianity vs. Islamic fundamentalism in the big boxing
ring of Hollywood. Look for this one to be shown at churches
all over America once it hits DVD (and how could Stone make a
PG-13 family-safe movie about the obscenity and horror of that
day?).
Let the record show that I
wasn't a big fan of last April's United
93, either. I'm not here to give out gold stars
for effort and good intentions, and I'm not here to argue the
importance of September 11 -- the reverberations will endure
for decades. What I am here to do is to assess the quality of
a given film. World Trade Center has some chilling, bone-slamming
moments when it shows us what it may have felt like to experience
the fall of the first tower from inside, but that's about all
it excels at. It may sound heretical to say so, but last week's
horror flick The Descent did
a better job of conveying claustrophobia and the rigors of grace
under pressure -- and because it wasn't hitched to a true, still-sensitive
story, it hit harder and sharper. I maintain that the best 9/11
film remains 11'09"01,
the 2002 anthology collecting eleven different views of the day's
events and impact. Failing that, movies like 25th
Hour -- or The Descent -- which deal with September
11 peripherally or subtextually may be the only way to tackle
this large, inflammatory topic until time allows distance, interpretation,
and artistry.
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