World Trade Center
With Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jay Hernandez, Armando Riesco, and Michael Shannon
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McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Pena) got trapped by a cave-in between the two towers while they were heading for the north one to rescue people on the upper floors. Both were immobilized for many hours, though they were close enough to talk to each other. The movie, with a serviceable script by newcomer Andrea Berloff, is also about their families, who were waiting for news over the course of that chaotic day. (Maria Bello plays McLoughlin’s wife and Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jimeno’s.) Practically everything we see of the attacks and their aftermath is filtered through the perceptions of these characters–and that of a former marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a volunteer who helped rescue the heroes. (“We need some good men out there to avenge this” is the last thing we hear him say, and later we learn that he reenlisted and served two tours of duty in Iraq.)
And I’m troubled that so many critics seem to think those elisions don’t matter. The most disquieting things I’ve read so far are some of the raves. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas called the movie “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you’ll ever see.” Columnist Cliff May’s post at the conservative National Review Online site said, “Words I thought I’d never say: God Bless Oliver Stone.” But the mind-set at work is truly laid bare in a longer review on the same site. Kathryn Jean Lopez contrasts World Trade Center with another recent treatment of the 9/11 attack, a film about the United flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers struggled with the terrorists: “Tasteful and well done as United 93 was, there was something about the movie that bothered me. The filmmakers showed me a bit too much of the terrorists. Calling home. Feeling sick. Praying. Forgive me my insensitivity, but I didn’t care to see them. I didn’t care if one or another of them was nervous in the minutes before the attack. It’s not terribly Christian of me, but I don’t really care about them–most especially in a movie that’s supposed to be about the good guys. I only wanted to see our 9/11 heroes.
I’ve always seen Stone as an authoritarian demagogue, and World Trade Center hasn’t changed my mind. Its phantasmagoric imagination is less homoerotic than that of Midnight Express, but it yields comparable hallucinatory effects, including glittery evocations of Jesus carrying a plastic water bottle. The rousing war-movie ambience, familiar from Platoon, is even more prominent than the religious mysticism. And the blinkered worldview it promotes only encourages the worst instincts of people like Kathryn Jean Lopez–insularity and xenophobia–even as they congratulate themselves for what they call Americans’ essential generosity of spirit. But then we’re all susceptible to being seduced by this sort of narcissism–maybe because it helps push away the harsh reality of a world in which more and more people hate us.
