Stone's World Trade Center Disappoints

As the 5th anniversary of the most horrific and sudden tragedy of our generation approaches, my wife and I spent last Saturday evening watching Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center”. For many people, but uniquely for New Yorkers and Americans, September 11, 2001 was a day that forever changed the emotional make up of communities and even society. As a Canadian, right from the early hours of that morning, I yearned to connect with those suffering on the ground in New York and Washington and with those in the air on the 4 flights from hell. As I watched the events of that day and subsequent days unfold, I found that my emotional capacity had been stretched to prepare for the unfolding enormity of 9/11, creating a vacuum that I have yet to fill. In so many ways I wish I was there to share the pain, sorrow, anger, bewilderment, rage, confusion and resolve that New Yorkers have been feeling. I guess you could say that I wanted to join the club, and I still do.

So in that unrequited state, I settled in to watch “World Trade Center” hoping to find the door to the club, walk through it and become a New Yorker. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. There was no collective emotion to connect with in Oliver Stone’s movie.

“World Trade Center” tells the story of human spirit and emotional turmoil that plays out for both the direct victims and their families when enormous tragedy strikes. Shortly after rushing into the burning world trade center, Port Authority Policemen, John McLaughlin and Will Jimeno found themselves trapped underneath the rubble of the buildings. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, their families are tortured for agonizing hours waiting for word on whether their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons are alive or dead. The scenes alternate between the families and the two heroic policemen who are using every bit of spirit they can muster to stave off death. Stone’s device of displaying the emotions of the policemen and their families as mirrors of each other was effective, but did nothing to connect me to 9/11.

The surprising failure of “World Trade Center” is that it didn’t actually need 9/11 as its backdrop. The same story could have been told about the miner that was stuck in the Sago coal pit or any other human drama where the emotions of the victims and their families are explored. To that end, “World Trade Center” certainly was a poignant movie, but it fell completely short of what it should have been.

As a point of comparison, I did get a taste of the collective emotional experience I have been yearning to share when I saw “Flight 93”. As opposed to “World Trade Center”, I felt anxiety, fear, sorrow, rage and even some vengeance when the heroes of Flight 93 took control of the plane and drove it into the ground. For a couple of brief hours, I was there in New York, in Washington, on the planes, on Flight 93. I was sharing a tragic emotional experience with all Americans that day. The difference was that “Flight 93” told the 9/11 story from the perspective of the all encompassing enormity it was, rather than from the perspective of individual victims.
As heart-wrenching as McLaughlin and Jimeno’s stories are, 9/11 is too big and touched too many individuals, to limit the scope of this story to 2 families.