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Trailer for "World Trade Center"

Prior to this week’s release of World Trade Center, there seemed to be about as much speculation buzzing around director Oliver Stone as there was about the movie itself. This was particularly interesting given the movie’s provocative subject matter, the 9/11 attack in New York City.

The disproportion was almost wholly due to Stone’s up-and-down record and reputation, and to understandable interest in how the sometimes free-wheeling filmmaker would handle such problematic material. Stone acknowledged the questions when he told a tabloid-TV interviewer that given what he called his “reputation for volatility,” he felt he had to go “straight for the truth.”

As it happens, Stone has largely held his proclivity for florid, frenzied melodrama in check. (He’d been toning things down in recent years, anyway.) WTC instead offers him some latitude for his awkwardly masculinized sentimentality. The movie, after all, is about two men, Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer Will Jimeno of the Port Authority Police Department, who survived the cataclysmic collapse of the World Trade Center’s north and south towers, becoming almost the very last of the very few who were rescued from the hellish post-collapse site.

The movie isn’t a recreation of the attack or its horrific general consequences. It’s the story of the terrible, unlikely experiences of these two, their stoic courage, and the varieties of response, including heroism, of the people who were closest to them, and of people they’d never met before.

WTC delivers on a fair amount of its self-limited potential, including the inevitable inspirational message. It follows the conventions of epochal historical fiction, literary and cinematic, except that for the most part it isn’t fiction.

McLoughlin and Jimeno (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena, respectively) are from the start at the center of the movie, as they rush to the Trade Center after the twin strikes at the buildings from the sky. The movie’s first half hour is really its best section. The New York City scene is set quickly and effectively (aided, of course, by our nervously informed expectation of what is to ensue). The Port Authority officers reach the scene of horror and havoc and try to steel themselves against the terrorized confusion. The movie follows them into the north tower and down to the concourse level (their location isn’t clear) and then their engulfment in the force-driven, detritus-filled nebula from the south tower’s collapse, and their virtual entombment in its broken remains.

Expertly managed, this extended dynamically involving sequence is the only opportunity Stone got to create the strikingly compelling effects at which he’s always been adept. Thereafter, he had to expand the movie’s scope to encompass the anguished reactions and other behaviors of the trapped men’s families, and to transfer WTC’s action from the underground confines to the New York suburbs and back again, repeatedly. This makes for a somewhat cumbersome operation, and it’s only a little lessened by the acutely effective performances of Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno).

Stone had to try to integrate the terrible but mostly static and isolated plight of the two officers with scenes of the distraught, uninformed tension at their homes. The effect domesticates the horror, to some extent. This is also patently meant to be an inspiring project, not a docu-dramatic recounting of the 24 hours following the attack.

Stone succeeds in keeping WTC on track much of the time, but sometimes it slows to a crawl. He resorts to flashbacks and psychic phantasms to convey the two men’s experience of what is a largely unimaginable ordeal, but they’re a little clumsy and uninvolving.

It’s difficult to imagine what Stone would have made of this story had he been given more independence, but he had to accept a script written by fledgling scenarist Andrea Berloff before he was hired. Stone’s sensibility hasn’t often proved conducive to balancing character, plotting and message. It’s far from certain that he would have come up with something better. Different, no doubt, but not necessarily better.

WTC’s portrayal of the remarkable ad-hoc rescue efforts of several men is taughtly engrossing but peculiarly unbalanced. David Karnes (Michael Shannan), an accountant and former marine, traveled to Ground Zero from Connectcut on his own zealous initiative and conducted a lonely search for survivors with two men he chanced to meet. One of these, an ex-paramedic named Chuck Sereika (Frank Whaley), had an even more emotionally involving story to tell, but Stone and Berloff slight it to concentrate on the heroic but martially eccentric Karnes.

Despite its backdrop of soaring tragedy and searing horror, WTC is essentially a small movie.