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Film

A picture of courage

By STEVE PERSALL
Published August 10, 2006

Images of the World Trade Center towers collapsing after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are seared into our collective memory. In World Trade Center (PG-13), Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone, right, probes beneath the rubble and carnage in search of the heroism of that day, focusing on a pair of Port Authority police officers trapped in the debris.

Sgt. John McLoughlin (Oscar winner Nicolas Cage) helped prepare a terrorism response plan after a 1993 attack on the skyscrapers. Not even that experience prepared him for what happened after two hijacked airliners struck the towers. McLoughlin led a small group of officers, including rookie patrolman Will Jimeno (Michael Pena, Crash), into the buildings in search of survivors. Within minutes, they were buried under tons of debris.

While rescuers searched for signs of life, the officers' families clung to faint hope of their survival. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) plays Donna McLoughlin, too accustomed to the dangers of her husband's profession. Maggie Gyllenhall is Alison Jimeno, pregnant with the Jimenos' first child. The two women didn't know each other, but they shared an emotional roller-coaster ride, emblematic of many people's feelings that day.

Stone (Platoon, JFK) is being criticized in some corners for not employing his trademark sense of muckraking to the subject; some people fervently believe the 9/11 attacks were an inside job with political and economic motivations. Stone's film isn't political, but it is grandly humane, seeking to illuminate a degree of goodness from a haunting act of evil.

World Trade Center was reviewed Tuesday in Floridian; it earned an A grade.

- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic

[Last modified August 8, 2006, 14:06:06]