?World Trade Center? Shuns Politics, Controversy

The N.Y. Times says “World Trade Center” marks a departure for filmmaker Oliver Stone in that the movie has no hint of a political agenda. It’s a “harrowing return to a singular, disastrous episode in the recent past and a refuge from the ugly, depressing realities of its aftermath.”

A.O. Scott writes of Stone: ?There is really no other American director who can move so swiftly and emphatically from intimate to epic scale, saturating even quiet moments with fierce emotion. He edits like a maestro conducting Beethoven, coaxing images and sequences into a state of agitated eloquence.?

?World Trade Center? is the second movie to be made about the events of 9/11, following Paul Greengrass? ?United 93.?

Both films revisit the immediate experience of Sept. 11, staking out a narrow perspective and filling it with maximum detail. Mr. Stone, much of whose film takes place at ground zero, does not share Mr. Greengrass?s clinical, quasi-documentary aesthetic. His sensibility is one of visual grandeur, sweeping emotion and heightened, sometimes overwrought, drama.

There are many words a critic might use to describe Mr. Stone?s films ? maddening, brilliant, irresponsible, provocative, long ? but subtle is unlikely to be on the list. Which makes him the right man for the job, since there was nothing subtle about the emotions of 9/11. Later there would be complications, nuances, gray areas, as the event and its aftermath were inevitably pulled into the murky, angry swirl of American politics. But that is territory Mr. Stone, somewhat uncharacteristically, avoids.

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