Oliver's story.(Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center')(Movie review)

THIS spring, shortly after the release of United 93, the cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum fretted that Hollywood's interest in the heroism of Flight 93's passengers might be "a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift." By swaddling the horror of 9/11 in the ennobling story of the flight that fought back, he suggested, we were telling ourselves a comforting lie about that day, and clinging to the delusion that "there must be a silver lining: It's always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony."

Well, forget the doomed flight and its heroic passengers--the true-to-life story told in Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, about two New York cops trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers and then borne up, like Ishmael from the wreck of the Pequod, to the comforting arms of their relieved families, is 9/11's pony if I've ever seen one. World Trade Center is a movie about courage, endurance, faith, family, and the triumph of the human spirit. It's the most conservative film of Oliver Stone's career, both artistically and politically. It's the September 11 movie you can take the whole family to see. And there's something more than a little bogus about it.

Not that Stone doesn't have an extraordinary story to tell. Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage, mustachioed and hangdog) leads a team of cops south from the Port Authority to the Trade Center; among them is an eager-beaver young officer named Will Jimeno (Michael Pena). The disaster quickly engulfs them, in a series of scenes that feel at once shocking and stagy. It's been so long since the watchdogs of the media have allowed us to see the images of fire and blood and people leaping to their deaths that Stone's recreation can't help but make the audience shudder. Yet it's also impossible for any group of milling actors to summon up as fierce a sense of ghastly reality as the original footage did. Memory is still stronger than art, for now.

Then the world comes down around them. This is the only truly surprising thing about World Trade Center--how quickly it all happens, and how little the men actually accomplish. You expect dramatic rescues and

scenes in smoke-clogged stairwells, but the team of cops never actually enters the Towers at all. They're still underground, gathering up gear and making their way through a subterranean shopping mall, when the buildings above give way and fall.

From that point on, the movie is just the two surviving officers, pinned together under the rubble; their wives and families in the suburbs, dying a thousand deaths while they wait for any news; and the remarkable odyssey of Dave Karnes (a granite-carved Michael Shannon), an ex-Marine working a corporate job in Connecticut who gets a message from God, puts his uniform on, and heads for Lower Manhattan to help. Stone cuts away from these narrative strands occasionally, but never for long: The movie's vision of 9/11 begins and ends with the trapped men, their families, and their determined rescuer.

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