The American Character

World Trade Center

Directed by Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone does just about everything right in his 9/11 movie World Trade Center, a dramatic recreation of what happened to two Port Authority policemen on that unforgettable day. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) were among the first-responders when the twin towers were struck. Helping to evacuate Tower One, their squad was trapped when the edifice collapsed. As McLoughlin and Jimeno lay buried in the rubble, Stone envisions the men’s desperate survival, the efforts by rescue teams determined to dig out any casualties, and the frantic anxiety of the men’s wives, Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

It is through Andrea Berloff’s screenplay that World Trade Center presents a well-thought-out view of the calamity. Berloff clarifies the event’s individual, social and domestic aspects. And Stone, with his practiced elucidation of Americans from various social strata caught up in political turmoil (war, big business, crime), recognizes how those different levels intertwine. This approach, rejecting United 93’s bogus docu-realism, never condescends to stroking our fears. 

After 9/11, hucksters have had a huge opportunity to trick filmgoers who are unable to distinguish the solemnity of recent history from tacky Hollywood manipulation. During United 93, when I laughed at its preponderance of action-movie cliches, a middle-class woman chided me to “Be respectful!” Respectful of what? Clumsy exploitation-film mechanics! United 93 became an occasion for the nation’s media—and only a few, gullible ticket-buyers—to display self-righteous self-piety. Thankfully, Oliver Stone doesn’t go there. World Trade Center could really be about any public disaster, but Stone dignifies it by not over dramatizing its significance. He chooses to enlighten us about American character. Avoiding action-movie exploitation and specious docu-drama engenders absolute respect.

As film fiction, World Trade Center offers an interpretation of history. So it must operate just as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds did—turning real-life experience into symbol and metaphor. This is the proof of Stone’s intelligence and artistry.

The introductory sequence of different citizens preparing to work is a personalizing montage—it’s not anonymous-making like United 93, which turned characters into ciphers. (Director Paul Greengrass was clueless about the American quotidian and indifferent to his actors.) Stone gets it right that 9/11 was a blue-sky day but also a mundane, blue-collar day. His focus is on the diversity of the Port Authority’s public servants. This is not the all-white fraternity Mayor Giuliani posed with on the 9/15 episode of “Saturday Night Live”—propaganda that immediately re-wrote history in a homogeneous, jingoistic image. Stone shows one Port Authority officer receiving word of the terrorist attack from his wife who heard the news on hip-hop radio station HOT 97—a pluralizing, socially-credible correction to Giuliani’s political canard. 

Stone refuses the class and race biases that pander to Patriotism. Instead, he commemorates McLoughlin and Jimeno’s unforeseeable trial as a shared social experience. Each scene in the rubble, on the streets and in the suburban homes may trigger your own, personal, isolating dread, yet Stone pushes for connection. Bypassing facile, demagogic homilies, he insists that the separate dramas compliment each other: Italian and Latino officers suffer and bond; both civilian and military volunteers join the rescue effort; and the two officers’ Catholic families, whether patriarchies or matriarchies, panic and pray in an ethnically distinct hubbub. These specifics are recognizable and necessary. Their freshness reveals how Hollywood customarily falsifies our social makeup or trivializes our common tragedies. Emboldened by the urgency of 9/11, Stone achieves a more honest sense of America’s urban mix than any from those New York-movie icons Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee.

War of the Worlds set the high water mark for 9/11 movies through its similar depiction of community. Like Spielberg, Stone understands how catastrophe interrupts the conflicts of daily living. Separating 9/11 events from the quotidian would be misleading and a betrayal of the ultimate purpose of pop art. Stone recapitulates Spielberg’s wartime metaphor, turning World Trade Center into a hometown crusade. It’s not simply that the director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July prefers war narratives; Stone knows that we need the ritual of familiar myth. It reorients us to life suddenly gone beyond our ken, or turned stupefying. 

Those core scenes of McLoughlin and Jimeno crushed under debris are ingenious. Recalling battle sequences in trenches or jungles, the men communicate through family stories, pop bromides and—when all else fails—sheer masculine camaraderie. (The salutation “brother” is coin of the realm.) Visually, the grim, collapsing dungeon—a pit within a pit—recalls the war tableau of Joseph Losey’s For King and Country, an exploration of the intricacies of political heroism. But here, Stone shows unexpected depth: knowing that 9/11 is not the moment to question patriotism (a pitfall for both the Right and Left), Stone turns to McLoughlin and Jimeno’s spiritual sustenance.

Both men’s marriages further reveal personality through intimacy and responsibility. These flashbacks are luminous and exacting, similar to Malick’s in The Thin Red Line, but here the women move fiercely—muses made real. In a corresponding gesture—but very bold for this politically correct era—Stone honors McLoughlin and Jimeno’s Catholic faith. He doesn’t let religion become a source of discord. In fact, there’s an extraordinary awareness of religious and political prerogative as germane to American individualism. This comes through in the subplot of Marine veteran Dave Karnes (played by Michael Shannon, his rectitude evoking Tom Berenger’s recruiting-poster GI image in Born on the Fourth of July). Karnes responds to the terrorist attack as a literal call to arms. He travels from his far-off town to the Towers site, following Semper Fi duty, to lend his hand. Like those lonely eccentrics in an Altman film, Karnes moves from narrative periphery to center and back. Solitary, and perhaps unknowable, he haunts our American pride. So Stone interweaves Karnes into Jimeno’s vision of Jesus—a salvation image that connects to McLoughlin remembering his wife. This multiplane sense of the spiritual life Americans hold in common is nearly miraculous—something only Griffith, Ford, Borzage, Clarence Brown and Spielberg would dare.

Each storyline in World Trade Center converges on the hellhole where McLoughlin and Jimeno lie imprisoned. (The wives obsess on that pit and at one audacious point, there’s even an intergalactic P.O.V.) As Stone thinks through 9/11, World Trade Center downplays tragic terrorism. Instead, he touches on existential despair, especially in a montage of empty commuter and subway trains followed by handmade posters of missing loved-ones. It’s the intellectual extension of McLoughlin and Jimeno being cast into “Hell” where one sees one’s mistakes (sins) and regrets; then longs for redemption. 

Contemporary Hollywood typically uses horror scenarios that teach how to be shocked rather than to feel—stories that balk at the possibility of movies interpreting life. But World Trade Center profoundly summarizes America’s 9/11 experience—as when McLoughlin comes out of his torturous would-be grave. Faith then provides ecumenical deliverance: A symbolic congregation of  hands reach down, pulling McLoughlin up, and he touches each one. That’s better than a mere memorial, better than any “official” Hollywood history editorial writers might call for. It’s an illustration of what we desperately need movies to provide.