"World Trade Center"
So for the first time in my 22 years in the newspaper bidness, my editors sent me yesterday to watch a movie.
It was the local premiere of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," a movie about two real-life cops trapped after the collapse of the twin towers before ultimately being rescued. I was there not just to see it but also to get reaction from other local folks who went (my story is here; trailers in various formats are on this page).
I'm the farthest thing from a movie reviewer, but I did have a few thoughts on it. Because they contain some spoilers, I'm sticking them below the fold.
First, as you've probably read, this is an Oliver Stone film that hardly sounds like an Oliver Stone film. There's no grand-historical political plot here (cf. "JFK"), no overarching tone of paranoia. This is in most ways a very conventional, straightforward disaster-rescue flick, albeit one based on real-life events. Perhaps that's because the movie's two main characters, Port Authority police Sgt. John McLoughlin (portrayed by Nicolas Cage) and Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), and their wives helped write the script.
But it doesn't look completely unlike a Stone film. There plenty of Stone's in-your-face camera angles -- literally: The camera spends much of the movie so close to Cage and Pena's faces that in some shots the bridges of their noses are in focus while their cheekbones are almsot blurred, the better to convey the claustrophobia the officers must have been feeling.
And some of the rest of the cinematography is just gorgeous. There's a golden sunset shot down the Hudson River toward the wreckage of lower Manhattan, for example. And one extended shot begins right in McLoughlin's face, then ascends through the rubble and up into the sky, where a long, thin column of smoke rises almost straight up like a stream of souls ascending to Heaven. (In real life, the wind was blowing the smoke east toward Brooklyn that day.)
And it wouldn't be a Stone movie without raw, powerful emotion, which the actors convey impressively. In particular, Maria Bello as Donna McLoughlin and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jimeno are both beautiful and convincing. (It is a measure of the circumscribed life I've led since becoming a dad that this is the first movie I've ever seen with Maggie Gyllenhaal in it. She's as good as everybody says.)
Michael Shannon is also good as Dave Karnes, a former Marine now working in an office who, watching the news on TV with his co-workers, announces that the country is now at war. Once a Marine, always a Marine: He goes home, dons his gear and shows up at Ground Zero, clearing security with a simple announcement, "United States Marines." Stone, who won a Bronze Star as an Army infantryman in Vietnam, has Shannon play Karnes as humorless and rigid to the point of caricature -- I really wondered where he was going with that portrayal -- until night falls and the search-and-rescue work is officially called off because of the danger of collapsing rubble. Karnes and another ex-Marine keep searching. Shouting, "United States Marines! If you can hear me, shout or tap!", they are the ones who find the trapped Jimeno and McLoughlin and reassuringly tell them: "You are now our mission!" (In real life, we learn from the closing credits, Karnes re-enlisted after 9/11 and has served two tours in Iraq.)
As an example of the disaster-rescue movie type, "World Trade Center" is better than average. As an example of the worst and best of which human beings are capable, it's excellent. Whether you should see it depends a lot, I think, on where you are emotionally with respect to 9/11. I didn't lose anyone close to me that day, but some people I know did (including my ex-boss in New York who lost a nephew), and I might feel differently about the movie if I had.