I had the same feeling about
seeing “The World Trade Center” I get when visiting the Viet Nam Memorial
in
“The World Trade Center” is told almost entirely from the point of view of two surviving Port Authority cops, John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena). Oliver Stone follows them from their ordinary routine at headquarters and their posts to the city wide emergency downtown. McLoughlin attempts to set up a control center in a concourse between the North and South Towers only to have the pride of the Manhattan skyline collapse on top of them. They have no idea what happened or if anyone knows where they are or if anyone is looking for them. They lay pinned under layers of concrete and steel, in pain, trying desperately to maintain consciousness, relying on each other to stay awake and alive with talk of family and friends.
In between scenes of deadly silence and the sounds of shifting debris moving above the men like shifting plates below the earth’s surface, Stone shifts the story to the wives of the two policemen and the anguish of not knowing what happened to their husbands.
Maria Bello is the most bellicose of the two women as Loughlin’s spouse, Donna, who thinks back to her husband at work on the home, at play with the kids and fights over money. There were times when she and her husband locked horns; and times they made love. Their life, like others’, was not perfect but the bonds of love run deeper that she would have cared to admit until this moment of reckoning. Maggie Gyllenhaal is the genteel mother-to be Allison Jimeno dealing with the unknown by fretting over the name of her unborn child. Relatives gather around in their moment of need. Calls go to the police headquarters for news of their men. All eventually end up at the hospital to wait. Waiting is the hardest part.
Oliver Stone breaks the silence of McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s concrete and steel tomb with scenes of the frenzied rescue crews clearing debris, crawling through the rubble and descending through the crevices of destruction. Despair and hope alternate between the sudden spark of a electrical fires and intermittent shafts of light. The personal details McLoughlin and Jimeno share with each other define their common humanity.
Except for the shadow of an airplane in flight strafing across the side of a building, no planes are shown hitting the World Trade Center. The Towers are seen in flames but there is no mention of terrorists or the circumstances that led to their attack on America. This disconnect from this one historic fact subverts “The World Trade Center” and appears robs it of a deeper emotional context. It’s surface story about trapped men, the women who love them, and the rescuers who will save them has more in common with a mining disaster movie. The one element that elevates “The World Trade Center” above this genre is the actors’ ability to involve the audience in the personal lives of the people they play. Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena make us care what happens to John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno.
Copyright 2006
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“The World Trade Center” doesn’ t have the same punch as the more riveting “United 93” that came out earlier this year from director Paul Greengrass. Having seen his masterpiece “Bloody Sunday” in 2002 about the renewed troubles in Ireland in the early 70s, I knew what to expect. The styles of both films were remarkably similar. You can check out my take on it in this year’s review section.