Out of Ashes Through Stone: World Trade Center

    I first saw the World Trade Center in 1994.  It was an ideal Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day, and my best friend and I drove in from Long Island where he still lives.  We parked in the Financial District, and caught the Subway under the WTC.  The building's façade seemed sterile and out of place near the other lower Manhattan buildings.  I felt dizzy looking up at it, and was glad we didn't have time to climb to the Observation Deck.  I was 6 weeks pregnant, with a volatile gag reflex.     

     Seven years later, while watching the September 11th tragedy unfold live on my television, first at work, and later in my apartment, my stomach felt the same queasiness.  I recognized the paradigm shift instantly as I watched the impact repeated every ten minutes between casualty estimates and rescue operation details. From the wounded, exhausted, and terrified survivors to the desperate faces belonging to the friends and family of missing people, the catastrophe seemed Orwellian, but also remarkably personal.

     Oliver Stone's World Trade Center culls the personal element from that disastrous day and reminds us that briefly, while our country grieved, other nations shared our loss.  In the film's only moment where Stone steps outside the narrative, we see a spinning satellite while we also hear a variety of foreign voices reacting to the news.  The film cuts to an effective montage of people, throughout the world, who are stunned and heartbroken by the shocking news.  Remember when.....

      Driving the story, written by Andrea Berloff, is Stone's focus on the rescue of two Transit Authority policemen.  Nicholas Cage as Sgt. John McLoughlin leads the cast, adding a bit of nobility to his bewildered Everyman character.  He and his small command become trapped in Building One's fifth elevator shaft.  Only one other survives with him, Will Jimeno, a likeable young recruit played brilliantly by Michael Pena.  Their ordeal is a determined study of fortitude during an unfathomable circumstance.

      While trying to keep each other awake, John and Will share important details from their lives.  John, who had been phoning-in his chilly suburban marriage, finally owns-up to his part in its casual decline.  His wife's imagined voice becomes the hallucinogenic catalyst for his survival.  Will, expecting a second daughter, muses about the affectionate argument he and his wife have been having about the baby's prospective name.  Though parched and in pain, Will overcomes defeat by summoning the image of his savior as Sacred Heart bearing a liter of spring water.  

      Waiting for word at their respective residences, the two wives expect the worse, but hope for a miracle.  Complex performances by Maria Bello as Donna McLoughlin, and  Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jimeno are both as honest as they are haunting.  Bello's characterization is particularly poignant as she remembers past moments of sanguine simplicity she once shared with John. 

      Of the twenty people who were pulled from the WTC ruins, McLoughlin and Jimino were the eighteenth and nineteenth.  The story of their rescue could have been melodramatic and overly sensationalized, but Stone uses a light hand to deliver a powerful message about ordinary virtue.  The filmmaker avoids his usual political point of view, and instead shows how goodness can connect one person, unexpectedly, to another.  The sets are eerily authentic, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvy's work mixes saturated tableaus of urban life with dark but intimate portraits of the two trapped survivors. 

     As we approach the fifth anniversary of our nation's epic tragedy, it's important to reconsider the events of September 11th, and their continuing impact upon our personal lives.  It is also time to reflect on its global effect, while calculating how one cataclysmic day has since transformed our nation from one with which others once sympathized, to one that now engenders mistrust and enmity.  Oliver Stone's World Trade Center will remind you that there is sometimes a vast divide between one's personal perspective and the prevailing political point of view. 

    And as mediocre as I once felt the Twin Towers were, is precisely how much I now wish they were still part of Manhattan's skyline.  I think of the World Trade Center almost as often as that baby I briefly carried the only time I visited it.