Venice diary - 'World Trade Center' review

Dave Calhoun has mixed feelings about Oliver Stone's 9/11 pic.

Sep  1 2006

If ever there was an antidote to the cold, scientific reaction to 9/11 that was Paul Greengrass' 'United 93', it's Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center', which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last night and is the inevitable 9/11 film: terrifying, soppy, mournful, awkward, respectful, gung-ho and thoughtful. One minute, it's pure knees-to-the-chest horror; the next it's so daft and sappy that it's near laughable, not least when the renderings of the hallucinations of a delirious, semi-conscious policeman buried in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center threaten to evoke nothing other than the LSD scenes in Stone's very own 'The Doors'.

The closing credits brought jeers from some of the audience at last night's screening (and, it must be said, ample applause from others), a reaction which must be put down to the incompatibility of a seasoned festival audience with Stone's mass appeal, white-of-the-eyes heroism and heavy-handed recourse to mainstream family - and religious, there's a crucifix in almost every scene - values as the saving grace of those who suffered or died as a result of the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001.

In Greengrass' 'United 93', there were no heroes, just ordinary people caught up in a nightmare; here, the events of 9/11, we're told, brought out in people 'the goodness that we forgot could exist' and the tight focus is on the heroism and suffering of John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), two Port Authority policemen who entered the towers that morning, were the last to be pulled alive from the rubble and whose testimonies inform Stone's film.

Just ten minutes into the film, the first plane hits. Here, the attack is made real, somewhat awkwardly, as a huge, oversize shadow on the side of a neighbouring skyscraper. But it's sound, not image, that Stone employs most effectively to evoke the horror of that day. We hear creaks and groans and crashes and thumps, from the first moment of impact until the end of the film when our two protagonists emerge, alive, into the light.

Snippets of news footage recall the day and a series of digital images of the two towers remind us of what was lost; but it's the often inhuman, unreal sound effects that pointedly remind us that despite blanket news coverage there were things that we didn't experience on that day, things we don't know and which we could barely imagine. Stone's recreation of the actual attack and the collapse is handled very well; it's tough to watch.

The film is at its best when confined to the mangled mess of the two collapsed towers. The camera stays close to the faces of Cage and Pena, and their dialogue is of the straight-down-the-line, tell-my-wife-I-love-her, don't-you-dare-die variety, but it's credible, if not always wholly interesting or dramatically engaging.

The film is at its worst when the pair's family lives are evoked to death. Is Daddy ever going to be able to fix those kitchen cabinets? Will Daddy be able to fulfil his promise and take junior to the ball-game? Does Daddy love Mummy more than he ever realised before finding himself 30 feet below the crumpled remains of two of the world's tallest skyscrapers? Again it's worth remembering how Greengrass took great pains not to tell us anything about the family backgrounds of his victims; one of the first images in 'World Trade Center' is of two children - McLoughlin's children - sleeping soundly in their beds.

'World Trade Center' is a movie that is both horrific and hopeful and in that sense is exactly what was to be expected from a film that never threatened to be anything other than the first mainstream and unchallenging reaction to 9/11 from Hollywood. It exists as the catalyst to a mass purge. If Stone wasn't the director, then an idenitikit film - timed, as this is, to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks - would surely have been made by someone else. Destiny pervades the project. Stone's done a solid, unchallenging job of the opportunity offered him by fate; now, hopefully, we can move on to better, more imaginative and and less introspective visions of our changing world.

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