World Trade Center Simply Has to be Seen
By Orson Scott Card
I had director Oliver Stone pegged. The guy hated the military and slandered it at every opportunity (Salvador, Platoon). He cared nothing for truth, deliberately lying about real people and what they said and did (JFK, Nixon), while claiming credit for “telling the truth.” He celebrated and romanticized evil (Natural Born Killers). He was trapped in the 1960s and couldn’t get out (The Doors – plus all the above-listed films).
So when I heard that he was the director of the film World Trade Center, I was sick at heart. This propagandist was going to pretend to tell the story of the heroes of 9/11 – most of whom held precisely the views and lived exactly the lives he had so long slandered and despised?
No way was I going to see it.
Until I started reading rave reviews from columnists who were ideologically the opposite of Oliver Stone. They loved this movie. They called it honest, fair-minded, heartfelt, ennobling.
Oliver Stone?
When, in all his works, had he shown a hint that he even knew what nobility was, or that he liked it when he saw it?
But, like a dog dancing the samba, some thing simply have to be seen.
And guess what? World Trade Center is an utterly honest, self-restrained movie. It tells the story of two Port Authority cops trapped in the wreckage between the towers, the families that waited for them, and the people who found and rescued them.
No Hollywood juicing-it-up nonsense (“What’s your second act?” “We need more jeopardy!”)
No Michael Moore-style leftist distortion and ridicule: George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani are shown in news footage of their best moments, without comment, but in a context that can only be called favorable.
Not only that, but Stone (and writer Andrea Berloff) made what can only be considered pro-war statements. Nothing about Iraq, mind you, but they preserved the viewpoint of then-ex-Marine Dave Karnes, who tells his office co-workers, “You may not have realized it, but our country is at war.”
In fact, it is Karnes (played compellingly by Michael Shannon) who stands all the previous work of Oliver Stone on its head. As an ex-Marine and a Christian, he goes to church to pray. He tells his pastor that he feels called to go and help. He puts on his uniform (probably illegally, but the movie does not even give a hint of criticism) and makes his way to ground zero.
When the search is called off for the night, he and another ex-Marine (played by William Mapother, who was “Ethan” in Lost, perhaps getting some rehabilitation from that creepy role) continue to walk the wreckage with flashlights. They are the ones who discover John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pea) trapped in the wreckage.
Meanwhile, Cage and Pea give moving, understated performances as men facing slow death with a keen knowledge of how much is unfinished in their lives. There are fear, pain, self-doubt, faith, hope, despair, love, and finally gratitude – and never a false moment.
What happened to Oliver Stone? Why did he suddenly stop propagandizing for the anti-American Left and tell a simple, honest story that might actually cause people to remember that America is full of good and decent people, and that our country might be worth sacrificing to defend?
Maybe it was the influence of the writer and producers; maybe it was his interviews with the survivors, actually getting to know real people who didn’t already think just like him.
Maybe after all his years of sniping at the military and glorifying criminals in film, he has actually come to see that the good guys are usually pretty good people.
Maybe he grew up.
Whatever the cause, Oliver Stone of all people has shown us what an honest historical film feels like. I contrast this with Spielberg’s wretched Schindler’s List, which didn’t trust the true story and had to juice it up to make Schindler nobler than he actually was, and gave him an epiphany that he never had. Where Spielberg can never stop manipulating, Stone chose to restrain all the Hollywood falseness and keep it out of his movie. Maybe the difference between them is that Stone has actually figured out where the truth ends and Hollywood begins; Spielberg has never had a clue.
Now it will be interesting to see if, at Oscar time, Leftist Hollywood is able to deal with a truthful, non-propagandistic movie about the event that triggered the present War on Terror. Are Oliver Stone’s credentials as a fanatical Leftist secure enough that they can forgive him for not slandering our President? Can this movie be nominated for, and perhaps even win, the Oscar for Best Picture?
The fact that this is the best movie of the year is not in question, you understand. The only question is whether there is enough integrity, enough open-mindedness and fairness left in Leftist Hollywood, to give an award to a film that doesn’t lie about people with religious faith, living modest lives in the American middle class.
Meanwhile, go see this movie. It is as close as any of us who were not there can ever come to experiencing what it was like for people who were there. And at the end, as the names of the Port Authority cops who died in the World Trade Center scroll up the screen, you will remember that so well did the police and firefighters do their work that day that most of those who died were the people above the fires, who could not have been saved by anyone – because on all the lower floors, most of the people were evacuated by the very public servants who died while searching for and helping the last stragglers.
This review was originally published in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.
