World Trade Center (Your Racist Friend)

(Note: This review is late. Please send your hate mail to the MBTA.)

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center opens with a shot of something bright, blurry, and red. "What is it?" we wonder. It might be a neon sign, but eventually comes into focus as an alarm clock, showing the time to be 3:29 in the morning. A man switches the alarm off before it rings, gets out of bed, and starts to get ready for his day by showering, brushing his teeth, and taking his watch and wallet off of his dresser. Very routine. WTC is a film that presents one of the most screwed-up days in American history in a manner that is very routine.
WTC follows the story of the aforementioned man, New York Port Authority Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage), and Officer Will Jimeno (The Shield's Michael Pena) as they respond to the disaster, get trapped in the rubble when the building collapses, and spend desperate hours waiting and hoping for rescue. These scenes are intercut with the reactions of others around the globe and the country, and also closely follow their families, most notably their wives Donna (Maria Bello) and Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Note my careful use of the word "disaster." Some words you won't hear uttered in WTC include, "Taliban," Al Qaeda," or "Bin Laden." The film tastefully avoids politics, and wisely focuses on the human spirit and how it reacts and endures in the face of unfathomable horror.
Note my use of the word "tastefully." This works quite well to define how a controversial filmmaker such as Oliver Stone handles a very, very sensitive topic. Stone avoids histrionic recreations of the disaster in vivid detail, and doesn't show us anything unless we absolutely need to see it. There is no excessive blood or gore, and I don't think anything the movie does could be categorized as morbid or ghoulish. Stone's usually flamboyant cinegraphic language has been pared down, save one or two specific shots among the solid cinematography. Minimalism is the order of the day, which enhances the subplots, such as the astonishing (true) story of Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), an accountant in Conneticut who felt strongly compelled as a former Marine to go to the site in his old uniform with rappelling gear and help out with the search and rescue operation.
It is pretty much scientific theory, going on law, that Oliver Stone is hands down the best living "actor's director" on the planet. He has gotten good performances out of mediocre actors (Kevin Costner in JFK), and phenomenal performances out of very good ones (Willem Dafoe in Platoon). There isn't much to speak of performance-wise in this film, with the exception of over-the-top and weird specialist Nicholas Cage being pulled wayyyyy back, with nice results.
I thought what WTC was a good film. It is not for everybody, as even a PG-13 depection of what happened that day will be much too much for some people, which is fine. It suffers from some wooden dialogue (Stone unfortunately did not write the script) and the fact that it's the furthest thing from escapist entertainment, but that's not exactly the whole point of art, is it? I give World Trade Center a 15 on the 22 scale.