Stoned and dethroned

If nothing else, World Trade Center reminds us that Oliver Stone can direct action sequences. Buried 20 feet below the earth and covered by seemingly tons of rubble, New York City Port Authority officers John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimena (Michael Peña) are helpless as fiery embers rain down upon them. We also marvel at a very pregmant Maggie Gyllenhaal's ability to run down a staircase and into roomfuls of Hispanic in-laws without breaking a sweat.

A shame he forgets that we love Stone for his nutball paranoid fantasias. There's something deeply suspect about a Stone film devoid of insinuations, threats, windbag rhetoric, and Donald Sutherland in a trenchcoat muttering National Security Council secrets at 500 beats per minute. I understand why conservative and liberal critics wept with gratitude when WTC contained no bewigged Colin Farrell-as-Prince-Valiant or J. Edgar Hoover snogging the kid from "My So-Called Life." As his coddling of Fidel Castro and enshrinement of John F. Kennedy demonstrated, Stone isn't so much an apologist for power as he is a devotee of men in power performing civic duties for the delectation of a docile, misty-eyed body politic. Example: Gordon Gekko can keep his wife and kids and Long Island mansion as long as he shares mistress Daryl Hannah with a bovine Charlie Sheen (I suspect Stone twice cast Sheen in the hopeless role of his proxy because he genuinely did see himself as a kid as stupid and inexpressive as Sheen, and in a sense wishes he still was). Shorn of subtext and conflict, McLoughlin and Jimena are daguerrotypes whose sensitivity to only the most primal of emotions (they miss their wife and kids) makes them interchangeable with the hijackers in United 93 praying to Allah. That risible film purported to re-imagine one chapter in the September 11 story as Airport edited as if it was a Pontecorvo movie; give Stone credit for shooting a more resonant Towering Inferno. Casting Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello as the worried wives is another plus. Let's remember that most Stone heroines have the libidinal charge of a Scotch tape dispenser – unless you're Sissy Spacek, on whom the assassination of Robert Kennedy produces a reaction analogous to the consumption of two dozen oysters. Stone, World Trade Center reminds us, is a patriot and a good man, in that order, and if it isn't he'll remind you again, on FOX News if necessary.

The closest he comes to creating a batshit-crazy leitmotif in the manner of the endless Zapruder stills of JFK's head getting blasted open or the Indian in Natural Born Killers is a hallucination of the Sacred Heart of Jesus seen by Jimena before he's rescued. The soundtrack swells. The voice of Ronald Reagan ("silver water over peach fuzz," wrote Edmund Morris) gently reminds him that while the Man Upstairs always deserves his due, the only being deserving of worship is a man's wife.