ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

OSCAR-WINNING director Oliver Stone has spent his career chasing conspiracy theories and scrutinising the flaws and failings of American politics.

You might expect him to take a very critical view of the events that unfolded on September 11th, 2001. Instead, he chooses to focus on the human element of the terrorist attacks, telling the story of brave cops John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were two of the twenty people rescued alive from the dust and rubble of the fallen twin towers.

Stone’s ‘World Trade Center’ is a restrained salute to the decency of ordinary Americans as they rose to the challenge of an extraordinary moment.

He begins his film with scenes of New York waking up to a September morning. The sun is shining. The talk is of baseball. The Twin Towers dominate the skyline. It is a typical routine of work and family, rush hour traffic and getting ready for school.

In other words, it is the everyday stuff of life that was to come under attack that day. When the attacks unfold the Port Authority police rush to the scene. McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Pena) were in the concourse between towers one and two when the buildings crumbled like a house of cards, burying them under layers of twisted metal, concrete, dust and fire.

‘World Trade Center’ effectively recreates all the chaos and confusion of the day with nobody fully aware of what had happened and loved ones desperately waiting for some news as they hoped for the best while fearing the worst.

Maria Bello plays McLoughlin’s wife, Donna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is Jimeno’s pregnant wife, Allison. Sentimental, tightly focused but undeniably moving, ‘World Trade Center’ offers no sense of the bigger picture or the wider context of what happened.

Instead, it serves as a requiem for New York and a nation’s lost innocence.

Nationwide release
Director: Oliver Stone
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jay Hernandez
Screenwriter: Andrea Berloff
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 129 mins
Country: USA
Year: 2006

© Allan Hunter, 2006