Arts & Culture

WORLD TRADE CENTER ABOUT COMMEMORATION

by Paul Butler

Maggie Gyllenhaal in World Trade Center

An alarm clock goes off just after 3 a.m. A gaunt, middle-aged man reaches to turn it off. Carefully, and without disturbing his snoozing wife, he rolls over and out of bed and creeps about the house in the pre-dawn silence, getting dressed for work.

     Just before leaving he quietly opens the bedroom doors of each of his children and for a moment gazes at each as they sleep.

     Then the man --who we will soon learn is Port Authority Police Sergeant John McLoughlin-- leaves his suburban home and heads towards the city. Other men are going through the same routine. A commuter bus carrying policemen towards the Manhattan dock area whooshes through the sleeping city, its slipstream tugging at an American flag that hangs half-unfurled from one of the buildings.

Nicolas Cage in World Trade Center

     In the dark and quiet of a cinema, I watch each icon of "American" life --family, patriotism, a celebration of blue-collar honesty-- and feel nothing but a creeping cynicism.

     Why on earth would a man who habitually gets up for work at three in the morning feel compelled to look in on all his sleeping children, even the teenagers? I find myself wondering. I have an uncomfortable sensation that I'm being manipulated.

     I don't want to feel like this. I have, after all, come to watch a dramatic depiction of real events that caused considerable misery and pain. The director, Oliver Stone, is known for works like Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) that challenge the prevailing jingoism of the respective eras in which they are set.

     So, I try to shake it off and concentrate on the details before me.

     It's later. Port Authority officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) patrols the sidewalks. He hones in on problems-in-embryo in the crowds --a drunk-looking man eccentrically berating a patiently listening woman, two young men scanning the people passing them with suspicious intensity. Suddenly Jimeno thinks he sees the giant passing shadow of an impossibly low-flying plane.

     It's a chilling moment, especially as the young officer disregards what he decides must have been an hallucination. From here on events take over. The Port Authority police are regrouped and taken in a speeding bus down to the site of the World Trade Center. One tower is billowing smoke, and rumours spread that the other tower has also been hit. The fear and general confusion are vividly dramatized.

     Sergeant McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) asks for volunteers for a daring rescue; there are people trapped in the smoking tower.

     Jimeno is the first to step forward.

     The bewilderment and the general lack of Hollywood heroics are convincing. Brave though they are, the policemen are also clearly frightened, and they don't storm up the building John Wayne-style, but rather go through an exhaustive process of equipping themselves with oxygen canisters and masks.

     While still on the ground floor of the shopping concourse, the policemen hear a thunder-like groan. Sensing an avalanche above them, Sergeant McLoughlin orders his volunteers into an elevator shaft. The noise of crumbling stone becomes deafening and everything goes dark.

     When they wake up, those who have survived the initial collapse find themselves buried beneath layer upon layer of rubble.

     Andrea Berloff shared her screenwriting credit with the two men --McLoughlin and Jimeno-- who survived the ordeal and their wives, Donna and Allison. It is the verity of direct experience that keeps at least some of this story grounded.

     But despite the horror of the two men calling to each other in the darkness as rocks skitter past from above and fireballs shoot up from below, that nagging cynicism doesn't go away.

     Retired marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) stares at a TV screen in his workplace as President George W. Bush declares that America will pass the test that has been set before it. Turning from the screen and from his gathered colleagues, Karnes growls that whether or not people realize it, America is at war.

     Believed by the test audiences to be a Hollywood confection, Karnes --who dons his former battle fatigues goes down to "ground zero" and personally rescues McLoughlin and Jimeno from their day-long purgatory-- is a true-to-life characterization.

     It might seem illogical to complain about political bias if a story is merely telling it the way it was, but, for me, it was with Karnes that my patience finally snapped.

     Real life stories are selected for dramatization; they don't come to our movie screens through any kind of egalitarian process. If subjects were chosen solely on dramatic potential, the degree of trauma, or suffering experienced by characters, we surely by now would have seen many depictions of Afghani and Iraqi civilians under fire.

     By choosing the former marine and depicting --no doubt accurately-- Bush and the Christian church as his two driving influences, Hollywood and Stone are reinforcing a world view that is already entirely dominant to the audience they are addressing.

     I'm not callous enough to remain unaffected by suffering even when it is tinged by sentiment and a political slant, and I did notice that in the darkness around me as I watched World Trade Center there were more than a few stifled sobs.

     But as the movie ended with a list of those who "fought" on 9/11, I certainly began to feel that the sole purpose of World Trade Center is that of commemoration, and that it doesn't attempt to step beyond well-aired versions of events to achieve even this limited atristic purpose.

Paul Butler is a St. John's-based writer. His most recent novel is NaGeira. His website is www.paulbutlernovelist.com