Oliver Stone’s ‘Trade Center’ Is Two Stories Short
When the movies revisit tragedy of grand scale, a viewer’s underlying hope is to learn something new and illuminating beyond the immediate story. In a film about two policemen trapped under the collapsed World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, for example, one wants it to go further than chronicle their anguish. It should ask: What did they learn under that bone-crushing steel and concrete?…. “World Trade Center,” Oliver Stone’s film about Port Authority officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (played, respectively, by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pe‚àö¬±a), is long on veneration for its subjects and scrupulous in portraying the details, big and small, of what unfolded that day. But it shortchanges audiences when it comes to dramatic revelations that could have resonated on a deeper level. It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don’t reach us.
When United 93 came out, I swore that I would never see it. I saw no reason to revisit 9.11 and the horrific emotions it generates within me. It’s not that I want to forget that day- far from it- but do we really need Hollywood to memorialize the story in it’s own inimitable and commercial way?
Then there is the question of whether or not filmmakers should be making money off a tragedy that violently and permanently separated so many innocents from their families and loved ones? I don’t pretend to know the answer to this question, but it is something that greatly disturbs me.
In the end, I did go see United 93, and it was every bit as disturbing and emotionally wrenching as I’d expected it to be. I don’t know why I was surprised; it’s not as if I didn’t know how things were going to end. I don’t know whether I regret seeing United 93 or not, but I do know that I have no desire nor any intention of seeing World Trade Center. It’s not that I’m concerned about it being some sort of feel-good-about-being-an-American propaganda film, but the fact that the Conservative and Right-wing Christian press is already heaping hosannas on their former Great Satan, Oliver Stone, ought to provide a clue to the recurring theme of the movie. (Some Conservative religious pundits are trumpeting the movie as “required viewing for every American”) If I want to be preached at, I’ll go to church. If I want to be fed Right-wing propaganda, I’ll watch Fox News Channel. If I want to be disturbed by a movie, I’ll watch A Clockwork Orange again. I just don’t know that I need to be subjecting myself to yet another commercialized telling of the worst, most horrific day in this nation’s history.
I’m sure that there’s value in World Trade Center. It may be a perfectly wonderful, sensitive, and outstandingly historically respectful and accurate film. I simply want no part of it. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not EVER.
