Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here. It goes without saying that Oliver Stone is an easy target. For whatever reason (because it certainly isn't because his movies are no damn good), he is a whipping boy among many film critics and at least one half of the political demographic of this country (probably more). I'll admit, there's a part of me that wants to rewatch Alexander just to see if it's as god-awful as I remember it. When I consider Stone's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to directing and existing, it makes him an unlikely candidate to use kid gloves in a film about the downing of the World Trade Center towers.

But World Trade Center isn't really about the big picture. Its focus is a small, extremely narrow sliver of the world on September 11, 2001. In fact, huge chunks of this film take place in just a few square feet occupied by two very brave and lucky men, buried under tons of rubble. This is a film made up almost entirely of small, intimate moments, and thanks to a remarkable cast and a story almost impossible to get wrong, Stone pulls off about half of a great movie.

I do not suffer lightly a director trying to manipulate my emotions with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. A film can be well written, acted, shot, edited, and directed, but when I feel a filmmaker is inventing drama for the sole purpose of an emotional reaction from me, I rebel and resist. Obviously, 95 percent of all romantic comedies fall into this category, and, granted, movie making is about manipulation. But there are levels. The movie is based on the real-life story of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), and even when he's sticking close to the facts, Stone's manipulating is undeniable.

Most of the scenes that you've seen in the trailers--men in rescue worker helmets and coats running for their lives as the towers literally fall down on top of them--are taken from the film¹s first 20 or 30 minutes. These are rapid-fire sequences that don't need any beefing up, and Stone handles them perfectly. As McLoughlin and his crew attempt to organize a trip up one of the towers to look for survivors, they hear loud crashing sounds above them. At first you think it's debris; then you realize the sounds are the bodies of those who jumped out windows rather than be burned alive in the towers. The rescue workers force themselves to not think about what those sounds mean, and it becomes clear right away that it simply never occurs to anyone that the towers will fall.

But once the towers fall, the movies shifts gears and becomes two very different endeavors. If Stone had maybe pushed a little harder (and the studio been a little more brave), this could have been a film about two men trapped under tons of rubble, talking to each other for hours on end in an attempt not to fall asleep and die. Despite their close proximity to each other, McLoughlin and Jimeno can't see one another; they are both pinned under rubble, so the most we even see of them are their head, shoulders, and arms. If ever you doubted Cage as a powerful actor (and why would you?), see World Trade Center. What he does with just his voice and face is truly incredible and moving.

Not to take anything away from the equally gifted Pena (who has had smaller roles in Crash and Million Dollar Baby, as well as a fantastic one-season stint on 'The Shield'). His performance is perhaps even more difficult because his character seems more alert and slightly more mobile than Cage's. As strange as it sounds, he also serves as the film's one source of comic relief. Even with death staring him in the face, Jimeno is cracking jokes just to keep the two men talking.

When your lead actor barely moves for three-quarters of the film, there's not much room for manipulation, and the images of these two soot-covered men will stay with me a very long time. Your mind can't help drift into thoughts of 'Is there any possible way I could survive what they are going through?' And the minute you put yourself in the characters' body, the film owns you.

Unfortunately, Stone frequently wanders from these men and into the lives of their families, and I'm not knocking any of the performances of those playing family members, who, for many long hours, are fairly certain their men are dead. The always-perfect Maria Bello plays Donna McLoughlin, while Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jimeno's wife, Allison. The problem with these sequences is that they feel utterly conventional, as if they could have been directed by anyone in line to make the next 'very special episode' of some crap series on the Lifetime network.

I don't doubt that this is exactly what these families went through, but seeing it re-enacted doesn't add anything to the inherent drama of these moments. If anything, it robs the power of the scenes under the rubble by taking us away from them. Yes, we learn about the thoughts going through the heads of these two men struggling to catch each breath, and naturally, they are thinking about their wives and kids (Jimeno's wife was pregnant at the time). The scenes of the families offer tension, passion, and lots of screaming and crying, but what they don't offer is relevance, and what they don't add is weight to the situation at hand.

Perhaps more interesting but not necessarily any more pertinent are the half-dozen side plots involving men and women from across the country who found any means to get to New York and help search for survivors (there were only about 20 people pulled alive from the rubble). My personal favorites are played by Frank Whaley and Stephen Dorff, as the first men who actually crawl into the unstable rubble to find the trapped officers.

When this year is done, I have no doubt that United 93 will be in my top five of the best films of 2006. There¹s just never been another film like it, and the timeliness of its release made it all the more riveting and necessary. As a record and representation of an event that still leaves so many hurt and angry, World Trade Center is a far easier pill to swallow. Its edges are rounded; its emotions are largely uplifting; and Stone leaves all sense of politics and grandstanding somewhere else.

There are times during World Trade Center where you can feel Stone force-feeding us sentimentality, and when that happens, the movie falters. There is nothing more powerful or gripping than the story of two men in what they believe are the final hours of their lives. When Stone sticks to telling that story, World Trade Center is a thing of beauty. So am I recommending the film? I am, but not without some major reservations. The one good thing about the family scenes being so weak is that they don't stick with you long enough to ruin what is so good about this movie. This is a very good movie that missed being a great movie by so little.

Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com