World Trade Center: A Small Story from an Enormous Event
Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena

Review by Breanne Boland
August 24, 2006 Issue

World Trade Center does not attempt to explain the events of September 11. Often it doesn’t even explore them. Instead, it revels in the first-person confusion of that day, making it a smaller story than the grand, general title would suggest.

At the start of the film, we follow a group of Port Authority police officers sent to the World Trade Center to deal with the pandemonium erupting following the first plane’s collision with one of the towers. Initially we follow around 20 officers. Following the collapse of the towers, we follow two: Will Jimeno and his sergeant, John McLoughlin, played by Michael Pena and Nicolas Cage. Trapped more than 20 feet below the surface of the rubble, they talk and wait and ignore the slow death that weighs on them as heavily as do the chunks of concrete that pin them in place. Maria Bello, as Donna McLoughlin, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Will Jimeno’s pregnant wife Allison, make up the other half of the story, as helpless spectators pacing, waiting for the phone to ring, and running through their regrets just as their husbands are.

It’s a good film, but it’s not the important statement you would expect from the second major movie to be made about September 11, 2001. Its scope makes it seem smaller than expected, possibly smaller than needed, for a movie about such a broad set of events. It’s the same difficulty that comes with making stories about the Holocaust — a large part of the group affected by what happened can’t speak, and their stories can’t be told. Consequently, any version of the events will be incomplete. The subjects chosen exacerbate it. As the epilogue states, only 20 people were pulled from the WTC rubble. Officers McLoughlin and Jimeno were numbers 18 and 19. Their story is thrilling, deeply affecting, and terrifying, but it’s not the representative story one would expect from a movie by this title.

Cage and Pena are excellent, especially as their stage was limited to the tiny air pocket in the pile of rubble the characters are trapped in. Cage makes the reticent and stoic McLoughlin sympathetic, disappearing into his role as a normal family guy with a distinct New York accent. Pena’s Jimeno is a jubilant, determined young father, managing to be almost buoyant even while pinned under a slab of cement. The actors take the same approach that Oliver Stone did — there is no showboating, only quiet competence adding to the feeling of reenactment rather than dramatization.

You can feel the filmmakers’ respect for the material and for the experience. You can see it as well — the beginning and end of the film are memorials for New York that was and New York that is — wide shots of the horizon at dawn, gossamer portraits of a New York we’ll never see again. The beginning is a eulogy; the end is an elegy.

World Trade Center is a solid retelling of a small story that came from that day. It isn’t the definitive film about it that will likely be made years from now. Rather, it’s a film at the start of a wave of many that will chip at the events of the day, showing facets of what happened, vignettes of the day. As a first step, it’s understandably uncertain at times, but if this is the beginning, there’s a lot to be anticipated in the years to come.

Bottom line: occasionally too respectful, but sturdy throughout

Sidebar
Also Playing: Snakes on a Plane
Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Marguiles, more than 450 snakes
There’s pleasure in a movie that’s unintentionally funny, but it’s just delicious when a movie knows exactly what it’s doing. Such is the case with Snakes on a Plane. I’m not saying it’s a good movie by the standards usually used by this column. However, if you go see this, you will have a good time. You will have an even better time if you go with the silliest friends you have, and it will only improve if there is alcohol involved.

Coming Soon

Aug. 25
Beerfest – a Dodgeball-looking comedy from the makers of Super Troopers.
Invincible – a common-man-makes-good football film starring Mark Wahlberg. Based on a true story.

Sept. 1
This Film Is Not Yet Rated – a documentary exploring the Motion Picture Association of America, a small, mostly unknown organization that rates movies, and also keeps some from being released.
The Wicker Man – a remake of the 1970s British horror classic.

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