'WORLD TRADE CENTER' Pinned Under the Weight of Skyscrapers and History

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By A. O. SCOTT Published: August 9, 2006

How will Hollywood respond? This question began to surface not long after the Sept. 11 attacks — shockingly soon after, if memory serves.
It was impossible to banish the thought, even in the midst of that day’s horror and confusion, that the attacks themselves represented a movie scenario made grotesquely literal. What other frame of reference did we have for burning skyscrapers and commandeered airplanes? And then our eyes and minds were so quickly saturated with the actual, endlessly replayed images — the second plane’s impact; the plumes of smoke coming from the tops of the twin towers; the panicked citizens covered in ash — that the very notion of a cinematic reconstruction seemed worse than redundant. Nobody needed to be told that this was not a movie. And at the same time nobody could doubt that, someday, it would be.

And now, as the fifth anniversary approaches, it is. For a while a lot of movies seemed to deal with 9/11 obliquely or allegorically. But Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” rather than digging for meanings and metaphors, represent a return to the literal.

Both films revisit the immediate experience of Sept. 11, staking out a narrow perspective and filling it with maximum detail. Mr. Stone, much of whose film takes place at ground zero, does not share Mr. Greengrass’s clinical, quasi-documentary aesthetic. His sensibility is one of visual grandeur, sweeping emotion and heightened, sometimes overwrought, drama.

There are many words a critic might use to describe Mr. Stone’s films — maddening, brilliant, irresponsible, provocative, long — but subtle is unlikely to be on the list. Which makes him the right man for the job, since there was nothing subtle about the emotions of 9/11. Later there would be complications, nuances, gray areas, as the event and its aftermath were inevitably pulled into the murky, angry swirl of American politics. But that is territory Mr. Stone, somewhat uncharacteristically, avoids.

“World Trade Center” is only the second film, after “U Turn,” that he has directed entirely from someone else’s script, and Andrea Berloff’s screenplay, her first to be produced, imposes a salutary discipline on some of the director’s wilder impulses. The unruly intellectual ambitions that animate both Mr. Stone’s most vigorous work — “Platoon,” “Wall Street,” “J.F.K.” — and his woolliest — “Alexander,” “Natural Born Killers” — may be held in check here, but the sober carefulness of this project nonetheless highlights some of his strengths as a filmmaker.

There is really no other American director who can move so swiftly and emphatically from intimate to epic scale, saturating even quiet moments with fierce emotion. He edits like a maestro conducting Beethoven, coaxing images and sequences into a state of agitated eloquence.

Ms. Berloff’s script is composed in the key of strong, simple feeling, and brought to life with vivid clarity by Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography. “World Trade Center” is, from the first frame to last, almost unbearably moving. It could hardly be otherwise, given the facts of the story and the memories it will stir up.

The movie concentrates on two Port Authority police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were trapped deep in the rubble of the collapsed towers, where they had gone to help with the evacuation after the first plane hit. Starting before dawn on Sept. 11 and covering roughly the next 24 hours, the narrative switches back and forth from the men to their families, in particular the wives, who spend agonized hours waiting for news of their husbands’ fates.