You'd think a filmmaker might smell trouble when the most memorable character in his movie turns out to be a building.
And no, this isn't about some upcoming Pixar animation in which a community of plucky, talking condos learns the true meaning of loyalty, self-respect and low interest rates.
The film in question is Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, an uneven and curiously conventional effort from a filmmaker whose best work has always been done without a net. Based on the actual accounts of survivors of the September 11 attacks, World Trade Center has the additional misfortune of being released in the wake of the superficially similar but far superior United 93 — a fact that may well contribute to Stone's film becoming known ever after as "the other 9/11 movie."
World Trade Center comes a little too close, in fact, to being the movie everybody feared United 93 would turn out to be. Stone's film is both too much and not enough, too calculating and almost alarmingly bogus as it proceeds to boil down the events of September 11 into the ordeal of a couple of Port Authority cops trapped in the rubble of the twin towers. In contrast to the slowly building, elaborately orchestrated rhythms of United 93, Stone's movie often has the feel of an overly familiar riff, a pop tune shooting its wad almost right out of the gate with its hook — a money shot of the mighty towers taking their hit. The accompanying images of bodies falling from the burning towers are the awful icing on the cake — shocking, for sure, but in a nearly pornographic way that exists only to manipulate us.
The images of falling bodies are mainly shocking, however, because they're so incongruous with the basically old-fashioned and even bland nature of Stone's movie. World Trade Center is essentially an old-school disaster flick, a based-on-real-life Apollo 13-ish drama that segues predictably between the plight of beleaguered, confined heroes and the agonies of their free-roaming friends and loved ones. The scenario plays out in methodical, surprisingly formulaic fashion (Stone, whose best films have always been written by himself, works here from a script by Andrea Berloff), with the director sublimating his unique filmmaking instincts and brazen stylistic flourishes in the service of a final product that, frankly, looks like it could have been made by any old hack.
Stone's actors similarly suppress themselves and come up empty. WTC's movie stars gamely sport working-class accents and bad haircuts in an effort to convince us we're watching ordinary everymen and everywomen caught up in extraordinary circumstances, but Stone seems out of his element in this real-world milieu, and his ensemble feels rudderless. At the end of the day, the performances lack the grassroots authenticity crucial for bringing off a project like this, and, more often than not, simply feel a bit wooden rather than "real."
The nominal star here is Nicolas Cage, bringing a dorky moustache and proudly receding hairline to the role of Port Authority cop John McLoughlin, one of a handful of survivors to be pulled out of the wreckage of the towers. Cage is a talking head here, literally, spending most of the movie completely immobilized and buried up to the neck in debris like some sooty reject from a Samuel Beckett play. Outside of the occasional pinging fireball and ominous shifting of rubble, the film's "action" basically consists of Cage and Michael Pena (as fellow trapped cop Will Jimeno), both wracked with pain and unable to move, conversing in the gloom in an effort to take their minds off their apparently imminent deaths. Stone emphasizes the characters' desperation by shooting these sequences in extreme close-up and with minimal light, but there's no disguising material that's so intrinsically inert.
When the movie isn't dwelling on Cage and Pena howling into the darkness or swapping life stories, it's following around their significant others as they strut and fret over their loved ones' fates — and this is where World Trade Center really gets into trouble. Stone and Berloff pull out all the stops, seizing on every sentimental cliché and maudlin signpost in the family values guidebook in a transparent attempt to counter-balance the film's harsher, less commercially palatable aspects.
We get bravely smiling, hugely pregnant wives (a brunette played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and a blonde played by Maria Bello); adorable, fretful tykes; and all manner of other lazily scripted, artificial uplifts that don't do much except to reveal the soft, gooey mass at the heart of this project.
As if all this pandering wasn't problematic enough — and long, strange miles from the freakishly paranoid but ambitious auteur of Platoon and JFK (not to mention the Stone who once promised a 9/11 movie provocatively recast as The Battle of Algiers) — World Trade Center throws in a red-blooded Rambo-esque action hero at the last-minute, just to make sure that the audience's jingoistic juices are at full flow.
WTC's Rambo, a God-fearing, flag-waving ex-Marine named Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), is just the sort of gung-ho crusader Stone would once have had a field day deflating, but here he's super-sized, sent to the front, and played absolutely straighter than straight. "We're at war," proclaims Karnes as he dashes off to Ground Zero to rescue possible survivors, adding with maximum conviction, "We're Marines, and you are our mission."
Never mind that the guy never blinks or that he projects a corn-fed creepiness a bit like the baby-faced assassin at the end of Nashville. Karnes sets his sights on his objective, delivers a few slogans and gets the job done, irony be damned. And the crowd goes wild. At least they certainly did the evening I screened the film.
True story: The evening I saw World Trade Center a massive electrical storm knocked out the movie's sound for a minute during the final reel. But it hardly seemed to matter. With its exaggerated emotions and simplified body language, Stone's film often plays like an unintentional parody of an old silent movie from a century ago. Even without hearing the actual words being spoken, it's not too difficult to figure out what's going on in World Trade Center or, for that matter, to read the writing on its various walls.
This sort of radical reductionism isn't all that unusual for big Hollywood movies, of course, but it's certainly not what we expect from a filmmaker with Oliver Stone's track record and potential. Stone's 9/11 For Dummies just might secure him the commercial hit he needs so badly after Alexander, but WTC isn't a very good movie, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the complex and powerful emotions conjured up by the events of September 11. The titular buildings of World Trade Center are clearly meant to represent far more than the sum of their shattered parts, but that's not at all the way it plays out in Stone's version. In World Trade Center, what you see is exactly what you get.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.