http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/weekend/15198098.htm?templa te=contentModules/printstory.jsp Out of the ruins In "World Trade Center," Oliver Stone (nonpolitically, he says) tells the story of police officers who started Sept. 11 as rescuers - and ended up as survivors. By Steven Rea Inquirer Movie Critic
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, doctors and nurses across New York were called to emergency rooms, in anticipation of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commuters, office workers, tourists, cops and firefighters who were expected to be pulled from the ruins of the twin towers. But the ERs remained quiet. The medical teams waited. In all, 2,749 people died in lower Manhattan that day. Of those taken from the rubble, only 20 survived. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is the story of two of those 20: Sgt. John McLoughlin and officer Will Jimeno, both of the Port Authority Police Department. McLoughlin, played by Nicolas Cage, led his team to the site, where the first tower was hit, and where the thwack of bodies hitting the plaza provided an eerie drumbeat to the chaos. McLoughlin, Jimeno (Michael Peña) and three other P.A. officers had collected air tanks in the concourse and headed for the stairs, to save workers who were trapped. Then the building came down. Buried beneath slabs of concrete and steel, in an inferno of smoke and fire, the policemen were seriously injured, immobile, as good as dead. Their rescue - the temptation is to say miraculous - is what World Trade Center is about. Unlike United 93, Paul Greengrass' documentary-like reenactment of the al Qaeda-hijacked flight that ended, fatally, near Shanksville, Pa., Stone's 9/11 film aims to be uplifting. The director sees it as a memorial: To the victims, the first responders, the citizens of 85 countries who died that day. "It's about people doing heroic things, good things, helping each other, and above all not letting the fear destroy them," Stone says. "These people really behaved well under pressure... . Rescue workers took their lives into their hands and jumped in there. I wanted to honor those feelings, honor those men." The $63 million production, shot last year in New York and on soundstages in Los Angeles, also stars Maria Bello as John's wife, Donna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Will's pregnant spouse, Allison. It is based on a script by Andrea Berloff, a heretofore unproduced screenwriter discovered by the film's producers. Berloff spent weeks interviewing the McLoughlins and the Jimenos and others. "One of the first questions I asked John and Will and their families when I was hired was, 'Why do you want to do this?' " she recalls. "And they were very clear. They wanted to pay honor to the men who died with them and the men who rescued them, who risked their lives to save them." (McLoughlin's and Jimeno's story came to the attention of producer Debra Hill, a Philadelphia native who died last year from cancer, in an article in the Philadelphia Daily News.) The right time? There are those who feel that it is too soon to tell - and watch - these stories. United 93, released by Universal in April, made a modest $31.5 million at the U.S. box office. World Trade Center, which cost four times United 93's production budget, has more on the line - for its studio and for its director, whose last film, the historical epic Alexander, was a mega-budgeted bomb. "I wasn't looking to do a movie about 9/11 until I got this script," says Stone, on the phone from Atlanta. "And maybe for some it is too soon, but I don't think so." Michael Shamberg, who produced World Trade Center with Hill and with his partner, Stacey Sher, draws an analogy to Pearl Harbor: "The next year, 1942, there were already seven movies about the bombing of Pearl Harbor," he says. "I hope we're not going backwards, that five years later we don't want to see an important part of our history documented in such a personal way." Berloff, the screenwriter, "completely understands" there will be people who aren't ready or willing to revisit the trauma. "But that said," she adds, "there are a lot of people who are, who want to know this story... . I don't think it's too soon ever to remember how brave these men and women were in New York, and how much they did the right thing. If we only remember it as a day where there was evil, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice." Maria Bello agrees. Interviewed in Philadelphia last week, the Norristown native said she was keen to do the project, in part for the chance to work with Stone and Cage, but mostly because she was in New York herself on 9/11, and witnessed the response firsthand. "I was there for a movie premiere on the Upper West Side with my six-month-old baby and his dad, and my mom and dad," she says, recounting a story she has clearly told many times since. "I walked out to get a pack of cigarettes at the newsstand and a woman turned to me and said, 'I haven't smoked for 11 years, do you have a cigarette?' And I said, 'Why?' "She said, 'A plane just flew through the World Trade Center.' So I ran back upstairs, and saw the second plane." Bello's mother, Kathy, a registered nurse, heard the call for medics. "We got in an ambulance and went down to St. Vincent's and she was there all day waiting for people to come in, who never came in." The actress walked alone for several miles back to her hotel. "I saw the most beautiful moments of human beings helping human beings," she says. "It crossed all sorts of racial and socioeconomic lines. People just held out their hands and walked each other up the avenue and were so kind to each other... . "That's what our movie's about, more than the tragedy of that day - it's about the humanity and the grace that came out of it." If the citizens of New York, and the world, came together that day, the five years since - with terror alerts and war in Afghanistan and Iraq - have brought polarization and politicization. Shamberg, Stone and Berloff acknowledge that telling the story of McLoughlin and Jimeno is different than, say, telling the story of a heroic rescue in a mining disaster, or a flood. Not a political film Stone has said that World Trade Center is not a political film. But the director of such controversial fare as the presidential dramas Nixon and JFK, and the Vietnam War pics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, notes that 9/11 is freighted with political meaning. It is an event, he says, that has become a symbol, exploited by the right and the left. Paramount, trying to generate word-of-mouth, has screened World Trade Center not only for fire and police departments around the country, but also for church groups. A special marketing company - the same used to sell Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - was hired to target fundamentalist Christians. Events in the film - as seen by Jimeno, who had a vision of Christ while lying pinned in the rubble, and by a Marine veteran who was instrumental in the two men's recovery - have decidedly spiritual overtones. And one of the principal rescuers, played by Michael Shannon, surveying the devastation, is quoted as saying, "We're going to need some good men out there to avenge this." That line was a point of contention among the producers, the screenwriter and Stone. "I'm glad I don't have to tell the story of what happened after 9/12," says Shamberg, who justifies the inclusion of the line. "If there's a small link to what happened afterwards implicit in that line, it represents a valid sentiment that many felt that day. "We were told, my partner Stacey and I, by the fire commissioner in New York at the time and his replacement, that this was an act of war that we weren't prepared for. So that is a point in the film, however subtle. But that's about it. It's not a political objective. It's a statement, and you can interpret it however you want. "If the debate becomes, 'Gee, we were all together in this that day, and where are we now? How do we get back together?' Well, that's a debate I'd be happy to have." Stone has a similar take: "The fact is," he says, "that when you mention 9/11 [now], it's lost its true meaning. Because it's become a political event, involving revenge, war, death, fear, more death, and constitutional breakdowns. "But we're not going to go there, are we?" he adds, a note of irony - or maybe warning - in his voice. "That's another movie, and it's five years down the road." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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