By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
This Week in 'WTC': Ansen, Conservatives Over the Moon
After a relatively busy week of premiere crashing and misogyny theory, The Reeler sees one thing and one thing only on the radiating horizon: Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, booked for an Aug. 9 release and yielding a half-dozen or so “news” stories per day. Most follow the same “Don’t look now, but the right loves Ollie” or “too-much-too-soon?” tack we have seen roiling the media since last month, largely acknowledging that Stone is smart and the film is good–while loosely implying that was it not good, nobody would actually say so.
Take David Ansen’s expansive cover story in the latest issue of Newsweek:
Stone’s World Trade Center is a very different kind of movie. For one thing, it’s a story few of us have heard. More crucially, it holds out hope: it’s a story of survival and selflessness. What it does share with United 93 is the desire to look at the event with eyes uncontaminated by politics. WTC should be embraced as readily by conservatives (whom Paramount is actively courting with advance screenings in Washington) as by liberals. For two hours and nine minutes, at least, it makes the distinction irrelevant.
In other words, WTC has entitlement issues that have nothing to do with its quality: It is gutsy art, it is humanist catharsis, it transcends ideology and thus, in many ways, defies opinion. As such, maybe the issue at hand is not whether or not artists have the right to survey 9/11 (a ridiculous non-issue to which Ansen and others pay far too much heed), but rather the point at which their work stops being art and instead exists as a sort of cultural doctrine–a standard-bearer rather than a reflection. I will not see the film for another week, but the question I cannot shake is not the one asking if World Trade Center is too much too soon for victims and their families. I just want to know if it is too much too soon for a culture that appears to reward risk only insofar as it affirms its identity (and forwards a cut of the profits to charity). Does this make me a cynic?
(Photo: Francois Duhamel/Paramount Pictures)
