The premiere of Oliver Stone’s movie about 9/11, the studio bosses had promised, would be low-profile: a restrained affair, designed to show sensitivity towards the tragedy.
Unfortunately, nobody seemed to have passed that message to throngs of police officers, twitchy security men, limousine drivers and clipboard-wielding publicists, or even Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York — all of whom colonised half a Manhattan block for the launch of a film that many had been awaiting with queasiness.
”If you take a look at the book of Revelations …” shouted the obligatory placard-wielding evangelist from the sidewalk. But all the attention was on the red carpet, which the film’s stars, including Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal, shared with police officers and firefighters caught up in the events.
Five years on, many of them have developed a recognisable stoniness in the face of media attention — the by-product of being expected to find something profoundly thoughtful to say, again and again, about a day when thought had been completely pushed aside by instinct.
”I’m here today because my best friend was the last guy out alive,” said a moustachioed man who gave his name as Charlie. ”The thing is, this is a story of survival.”
The news that Stone was directing World Trade Center, the first fully fledged Hollywood movie about 9/11, had been greeted with alarm. (The first feature film on the subject, United 93, was made by a British director, Paul Greengrass, in a decidedly un-Hollywood style.)
At first objectors noted the director’s predilection for conspiracy theories (most notably, JFK, the sensitive issue of who was behind the Kennedy assassination) and suspected him of insufficient patriotism: his first response to 9/11 had been to call the attacks a ”revolt”.
But by this year, the fear was that Stone (59), whose other acclaimed films include Platoon and Natural Born Killers, had gone too far in the opposite direction.
The movie’s syrupy trailer suggested it would tell the story of John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, police officers rescued from the rubble, as a tale of quasi-religious redemption. ”The world saw evil that day,” the slogan ran. ”Two men saw something else.”
Paramount even hired Creative Response Concepts, the PR firm behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Democrat candidate John Kerry, to market the film to conservatives. Conspiracy theorists, who must have thought they could rely on Stone, soon threatened to boycott it.
In fact, the finished result, which cost $60-million, tells a careful story shorn of politics, focusing relentlessly on the personal narratives of McLoughlin and Jimeno, played by Cage and Michael Pena.
”Everyone from Oliver down checked their ego at the door,” Jimeno, who attended the premiere, told one reporter.
The two men entered the south tower of the World Trade Centre as part of a team of five, moments before it collapsed. The raining rubble and steel killed their three colleagues. The film does not show the planes hit. ”We’ve already seen those pictures,” Stone has said.
For much of the movie, Cage and Pena’s heads are all that can be seen, as they talk, often about mundane topics, to keep themselves conscious, hopeful and alive. They were first discovered in the wreckage by a retired marine who has said that he felt called by God to jump in his car and drive from Connecticut to help.
”Stone’s terrifying recreation of the towers’ imploding — the sound of it — is the first time a filmmaker has shown us what it must have felt like from the inside … but it is that deathly quiet moment after the screen goes black, when we first see in the darkness the pinned, immobile body of McLoughlin buried in the rubble of the tower, that the viewer feels a stab of claustrophobic panic,” Newsweek‘s critic wrote. ”We ask ourselves not just ‘Will John and Will ever get out?’ but, more selfishly, ‘Will we?”’
Two widows of officers killed in the tower have criticised Jimeno and McLoughlin for acting as paid consultants. One police union warned members that watching the film could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder. New York’s governor, George Pataki, spoke at the premiere to try to placate detractors.
Yet the film that addresses 9/11 head-on has yet to be made. United 93 achieved much of its power by focusing on the least-prominent attack. Stone’s movie may be the first to address the attacks on the World Trade Centre, but it does so obliquely. A review for Entertainment Weekly captured the disappointment: ”Stone, who at his greatest is the most harrowing of filmmakers,” the magazine said, ”now recedes into the conventionality of uplift.”
What the critics said
”Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.” — Newsweek
”Good news for those opposed to an inspiring true story in the hands of a nut-job conspiracy theorist. But there’s little joy in seeing him morph into Ron Howard to play it safe at the box office.” — Rolling Stone
”By focusing on two who did survive, the film achieves emotional power and an uplifting ending.” — Hollywood Reporter
— Guardian Unlimited Â