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'World Trade Center': Hope among the ruins

On Sept. 11, 2001, when the twin towers in downtown Manhattan came tumbling down, 2,749 people died.

There were only 20 survivors found in the rubble.

Port Authority police Officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno were two of them.

Paramount Pictures 'World Trade Center' B The verdict: Powerful, if not perfect. Director: Oliver Stone Starring: Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Stephen Dorff Run time: 125 minutes Release date: August 9, 2006 Rating: PG-13 for intense and emotional content, some disturbing images and language. See showtimes Behind the scenes •  Will Jimeno had only one thought: Save the people. •  What? An Oliver Stone film with no conspiracy theories? •  Says the director: "The lie has been, Oliver Stone makes up history." On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

"World Trade Center" tells their story, along with those of a handful of others. It does so respectfully, apolitically, with restraint.

The director is Oliver Stone, a filmmaker not generally associated with plain-spoken moviemaking. Yet Stone uses the extraordinary cinematic skills he's honed in fireball pictures such as "Platoon," "JFK," "Natural Born Killers" and "Born on the Fourth of July" to infuse an essentially static story (once the towers collapse, it's basically about two men in a hole and their helpless families) with passion and intensity. He turns their triumph into an emblem of the nation's post-Sept. 11 triumph of the spirit (at least for a time), and in doing so he creates a kind of collective catharsis. Like the ancient Greek playwrights, he uses art as a historical filter, as a way to bring people together.

That said, "World Trade Center," is not a great movie — there are lapses in pacing, and emotional manipulation. But it's a quite good one, full of great moments and with a final 10 minutes so choked with emotion you'll be digging for Kleenex (you've been warned).

Stone begins by reminding us how very ordinarily the day began. McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Peña) report to their jobs as usual. There's the usual early-morning debriefing — keep an eye peeled for an 11-year-old runaway from Rhode Island. And the usual rounds, giving directions to tourists, giving a probable drug dealer the once-over, etc.

However, a shadow of a plane — that's all Stone ever shows — is briefly reflected against a building. A bump is felt. We hear someone on CNN say, "Something relatively devastating is happening." And so it begins.

Because he's familiar with the blueprint of the towers, McLoughlin commandeers a bus and takes some of his men downtown to help. They are in the underground concourse between Towers 1 and 2 when the world comes crashing down on top of them.

The rest of the film divides its attention three ways: the trapped men, pinned and in pain, striving to keep each other awake with the reminder, if you don't make it, I don't make it; their wives — Maria Bello as Donna McLoughlin and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a very pregnant Allison Jimeno — and families, trapped in their own kind of hell, not knowing when, or if, their men will come home; and a lone, deeply religious former Marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who put on his uniform and drove to the site, where he bluffed his way into the rubble and found McLoughlin and Jimeno.

Wisely, Stone doesn't try to encompass the scope of that day or the enormity of the tragedy — though, through a few well-chosen shots, he reminds us of the world's anguished reaction. Instead, he uses this one sliver of good fortune as a prism, as a tiny miracle of hope amid devastation.

We may glimpse the towers imploding on a passing television screen, but we never see them on-screen. Nor do we spend much time with the other frantic rescue workers or the dazed survivors. Stone stays in the moment. Donna apprehensively folding laundry. Allison's nerve-wracked trip to a drug store. Karnes' visit to a church. McLoughlin's confusion as paper rains down and no one on the streets quite yet knows what's happened.

As Ron Howard did in "Apollo 13," Stone creates tension out of a foregone conclusion. We know these men survived, yet every shift in the debris, every unexplained sound make us uneasy. Further, like Howard, Stone doesn't mind coming across as maudlin or melodramatic — sometimes to the detriment of the film. But he's there to serve this narrative, and if Jimeno says he had a vision of Jesus with a water bottle and it helped him stay alive, then it goes in.

Comparisons with this spring's more documentary-like "United 93" are inevitable, but misplaced. The two films share a time frame, an emotionalism and a theme — the heroism of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. That said, "World Trade Center" takes a more dramatic approach to the material. It's like expecting "The Longest Day" and "Saving Private Ryan" to be similar because they're both about the Normandy invasion.

Stuck in what could've come off as a Samuel Beckett farce — two people buried up to their necks — Cage and Peña give gripping performances. Aside from several flashbacks, all they've got to work with are their eyes and their voices. Yet they convey every possible shade of emotion, from fear to anger to hope to, at times, a pitch-black sense of humor. Bello's and Gyllenhaal's roles are limited, too, in a different way — the worried, hand-wringing wife has been around since Penelope waited for Odysseus — yet they, too, bring nuance and humanity to their roles.

"World Trade Center" is selfless filmmaking at its best. Here, without frills or bombast or politics, is the day the world turned upside down. Our faith in each other, Stone's movie tells us, is what helped right it again.