The startling thing about World Trade Center, directed by the immodestly political Oliver Stone, is that it isn’t in any way political. This may be difficult to comprehend if you’re familiar with the heavily politicized Nixon and JFK (the former being a ham-handed character profile, the latter a deliriously enjoyable piece of paranoid hokum), both of which take liberties with history and are clearly informed by a singular, hotheaded sensibility. People may in fact be shocked by the integrity of the enterprise, with its harrowing recreation of Ground Zero (the remarkable production design is by Jan Roelfs) and its earnest depiction of bravery and patriotic togetherness. It doesn’t have the aesthetic daring of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (the first significant 9/11 film of the year), but it achieves a certain grandeur all its own.

The theme of Andrea Berloff’s shapely screenplay, culled from the testimony of John McLoughlin and William Jimeno (the two NYC policemen who were among the last to be rescued from the collapsed twin towers), is survival. The cops are played self-effacingly by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña as average, workaday family men. Stone’s camera patiently observes their call to action, their attempts to evacuate the towers after the airplanes hit, their subsequent entrapment in the falling rubble, and their eventual rescue by the Marines. As they lay helpless (like Richard Benedict in Billy Wilder’s brilliant Ace in the Hole) under the tonnage of concrete, broken pipes, and splayed wires, they try to keep up morale with anecdotes about their wives, jobs, hopes, fears. Meanwhile, their afflicted families (Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal costar) refuse to abandon hope that their loved ones are alive.

That’s the gist of the plot. No flagrant Bush-whacking. No leftwing conspiracy theories. Just the bare facts, told as they actually occurred. It begins with a stomach-turning recreation of what it must have been like to witness the crumbling of the first tower from inside the building, and follows with one of the most realistic evocations of hell on earth ever filmed (the company of dead bodies, the fireballs that sear the flesh, the view of the sky above, hopelessly out of reach). The wrecked interiors are shot by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey in mossy-green, mausoleum-like colors, and when the cops are freed from their awful prison, you eagerly breathe the fresh air along with them.

The film is disadvantaged by a surfeit of rescue-movie clichés (contrived flashbacks, overly familiar cutaways to scenes of domestic strife), and a vague, overemphatic score that does no great service to the action. Still, this kind of story has a built-in inspiration factor, and it allows for some skillful low-key acting, (including a vivid supporting performance by Michael Shannon as a straight-lipped, churchgoing Marine). Cage and Peña, who must do most of their emoting pinned beneath concrete slabs, their faces caked with dirt and grime (they already resemble corpses), valiantly do honor to their real-life counterparts. 

There has been a flurry of doubt as to whether a natural polemicist like Stone (who openly criticized America’s response to the attacks) could do justice to the sensitive material. Undoubtedly aware of his public image, Stone opts to play it cool. One gets the feeling he’s somehow holding back, perhaps in an attempt to win back critical approval after the failure of his pretentious Alexander. Though his vitriol is consistently held in check by his craft (he orchestrates some chilling effects, including a magnificently ominous shot of an airplane shadow flitting across a New York high-rise), it must be remembered that he accomplished a similar feat with the Faustian Wall Street, proving he can handle a morality tale gracefully and without bluster.

World Trade Center is Stone’s best narrative film in fifteen years, and a veritable olive branch extended to the viewing public. It is a mature film, and a mature audience deserves to see it.