The Travolta/Cage Project #83 World Trade Center (2006)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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The 2006 drama World Trade Center personifies the curious phenomenon of the non-Oliver Stone Oliver Stone movie. This is an odd breed of motion picture in which the preeminent bad boy of 1980s and 1990s American film deliberately represses his lurid, sensationalistic tendencies and focuses on being a storyteller rather than a provocateur.
Heaven and Earth was a quintessential non Oliver Stone Oliver Stone movie, an admirable and often engaging attempt to atone for the free-floating racism and misogyny that characterizes so much of Stone’s early filmography.
We all know the hallmarks of Stone’s films. For better but mostly for worse, Stone doesn’t just have a very strong personality as a filmmaker. He has an overwhelming, obnoxious, insufferable personality that informs every overwrought choice and melodramatic flourish.
Stone’s signature films are lurid and pulpy, druggy, profane and self-indulgent, macho, melodramatic manifestos in a furious hurry to make a statement and an impact, preferably at the same time.
Non Oliver Stone Oliver Stone movies are consequently defined largely by what they are not. World Trade Center is not stridently political, nor is it particularly provocative. It’s not violent or profane or juvenile in its conception of the world. Unfortunately it’s not particularly interesting or engaging either.
With World Trade Center, as with W., Stone set out to make a Very Important Movie, very recent History Written With Lightning. Instead he made glorified television movies with A-list casts and budgets but small screen, docudrama sensibilities.
Stone’s unusually restrained, deliberately, even perversely apolitical take on the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 casts Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin, an overgrown Boy Scout who makes a hard, honest, honorable living as a devoted Port Authority policeman in addition to being a devoted family man.
World Trade Center opens on the morning of September 11th, 2001, when, as we learned in Easy Rider: The Ride Back, the sky was crystal blue.
It’s the calm before the storm as cops like our hero and his colleague Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) prepare for another day of serving and protecting the citizens of New York.
World Trade Center is a firm believer in ACAB, only in this case that stands for “All Cops Are Brave.” Stone has always had a real weakness for hero worship. Despite his reputation as a decadent artistic outlaw, Stone believes in the greatness of the United States and figures like John F. Kennedy, Ron Kovic, Jim Garrison and himself.
Because they are brave heroes who embody everything that is noble and good about the American people, John and Will end up both being hopelessly trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center, stuck in a terrifying limbo between life and death.
In that respect World Trade Center almost eerily recalls another mediocrity I watched and wrote about for the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Travolta/Cage Project, 2004’s Ladder 49.
Like Ladder 49, World Trade Center is a hokey piece of cornball Americana about an incongruously bland hero played by a legendary eccentric who struggles to stay alive after being trapped in wreckage and rubble.
Also like Ladder 49, World Trade Center alternates between scenes of peril and extreme danger in the awful, uncertain present and flashbacks to their lives as boring husbands and boring heroes.
With the possible exception of Marlon Brando and James Dean, actors don’t get more charismatic, intense or innately fascinating than Nicolas Cage or Joaquin Phoenix. Yet Ladder 49 and World Trade Center make the perverse and deeply counter-productive choice to cast two of our darkest weirdoes as bland good guys.
Stone might have thought that casting a wild card like Cage in the lead role would lend the character an energy and sense of excitement but to the film’s detriment he delivers a performance very much in keeping with the rest of World Trade Center: grim, straightforward and oddly impersonal considering the lunatics in front of the camera and behind it.
Pena fares far better. As always, he’s an intensely likable, effortlessly magnetic motormouth with a gift for ad-libbing and improvisational. Unfortunately, when our heroes are kibitzing in a desperate attempt to stave off both sleep and insanity it feels like they’re improvising and Cage is, regrettably, improvising in character as someone who is deeply uninteresting.
World Trade Center gets a massive jolt of adrenaline with the introduction of Michael Shannon as Dave Karnes, a devout Christian and quintessential jarhead who sees the attacks as both an almost unimaginable tragedy and a call to action.
The Uber-patriot gets a buzz cut, puts on his Marine uniform and travels to Manhattan from his home in Connecticut to look for survivors and ready his mind and soul to avenge the attacks.
He is, in other words, the antithesis of an outlaw Stone anti-hero. Indeed, Karnes refused to work with the film because he didn’t care for Stone’s take on then-president George H.W Bush.
Yet the towering Marine is nevertheless depicted in an unmistakably positive, even reverent fashion, as someone who went above and beyond the call of duty for the sake of his fellow Americans.
In the hands of another actor, this character easily could have come off as a jingoistic cartoon, a real-life G.I Joe just aching for an excuse to get back into uniform. But one of Shannon’s many extraordinary gifts as an actor is the ability to effortlessly convey deep anguish and a tortured inner life.
Shannon plays the Conservative Christian as someone whose heroism veers unmistakably into madness, whose sense of dedication is nothing short of pathological.
I sincerely wish that Stone’s sluggish, shapeless, often meandering tribute to the heroes of 9/11 had focused on a fascinating zealot like Karnes instead of Cage’s oddly anonymous protagonist.
I liked Word Trade Center more than when I saw it at the time of its release. It’s not a bad movie, necessarily, just an underwhelming one.
9/11 may be a day that Americans will never forget but Stone’s dreary melodrama about it is nevertheless thoroughly forgettable.
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