In Their Own Words

While they’re trapped and getting crushed by the massive weight of concrete and steel, Stone cuts to the men’s families to show each wife’s torment.

By Dan Hudak

World Trade Center is a wonderful film not just for its gut-wrenching story of survival, but also for what it chooses not to show.

This heartrending, powerfully emotional memorial to those who died in the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, also serves as a celebration of life, hope and courage.

If this story had been made up by Hollywood, people would deem it disrespectful and banish it as a blatant attempt to profit from the tragedy. But writer Andrea Berloff sticks exclusively to first-person accounts from two of the last Port Authority Police officers pulled from the rubble and their wives.

The film doesn’t show airplanes hitting the towers because Officers John McCloughlin and William Jimeno, who were stuck 20 feet beneath the debris for nearly 24 hours before being rescued, didn’t see it happen. Nor did they see the towers crumble. We only know what they and their wives, Donna and Allison, respectively, know throughout the movie, which also prevents director Oliver Stone from injecting heavy-handed political diatribes or controversy. This is a story of great endurance and of love overcoming death, and Stone directs it with a simple, tactful approach that shows nothing but respect for the subject matter (even Jimeno’s vision of Jesus with a water bottle is reportedly true).

The movie starts in the early morning hours as McCloughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Peña, Crash) wake up and leave for work. Computer-generated shots of the World Trade Center in the background remind us of their enormous stature and the gaping loss to New York City.

McCloughlin and Jimeno report to the scene after the first plane hits, and McCloughlin then leads a team into the towers on a rescue mission. The first tower collapses while they’re between the concourse that connects the two buildings, but they’re able to survive by quickly moving to the elevator shaft — the strongest part of the building, McCloughlin explains.

While they’re trapped and getting crushed by the massive weight of concrete and steel, Stone cuts to the men’s families to show each wife’s torment as she fears for her husband’s life. McCloughlin is the father of four, and his wife (Maria Bello) stays impressively strong for her family while they wait to hear bad news. Jimeno’s pregnant wife (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is unsure of how she’ll tell their daughter, Bianca (Tiffany Romano), that her father didn’t survive.

The raw, desperate emotions of the characters make us sympathize with them and recall of our own situations on that fateful day. Undoubtedly, on 9/11 many of us thought of people in this very situation, and maybe even prayed for them. To see it played out from their perspective, then, has a horrifying yet liberating effect on our memories.

Is World Trade Center a better movie than this year’s other “9/11” film, United 93? It certainly is a more viewer-friendly one, but United 93 was tighter, more direct and came out first. In that last sense it softened the way for us to be able to bear World Trade Center. Direct comparisons, though, are irrelevant — the fact that these are two of the best movies of the year, about a most horrible day in our history, is what matters.

Comments? E-mail dhudak22@yahoo.com.

World Trade Center ***1/2

Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Andrea Berloff, based on the true life events of John and Donna McLoughlin and William and Allison Jimeno. Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Rated PG-13.

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