The 9/11 story doesn’t need staged dramatics

Firefighters -- exhausted, overcome, their faces kabuki masks of ash and grit -- became the symbol of the American resolve, post-9/11. They were the event’s immediate statue of Iwo Jima soldiers, the burning towers the figurative hill.

In an entertainment culture, such stories have a way of being refashioned as national kitsch, trapping you emotionally. For what they promise, if not insist upon, is closure in the form of uplift. Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” is this kind of mass entertainment, a true story leavened by big, uncomplicated-seeming themes -- bravery, the indomitable human spirit, the enduring power of family.

On the big screen, it all plays as Hollywood convention made gripping and inarguable by Stone’s filmmaking art; watching it, you feel both manipulated by the message and awed by the power of the imagery.

On TV, by contrast, re-creation presents filmmakers with the greater challenge of weighing words against image. Reenactment is a convention of the History Channel, and both its illuminating and trivializing effects are on display in two 9/11 documentaries, “Countdown to Ground Zero,” which airs Sunday, and “The Miracle of Stairway B,” airing Monday.

“The single most incredible survival story of the 9/11 tragedy,” says the news release for “Stairway B,” which tells of the 14 people -- 12 firefighters, a Port Authority policeman and an office worker -- who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

They were buried not far -- and not quite as hellishly, such as you can parse these things -- from Stone’s two Port Authority officers. While Stone’s movie is a triumph of what can be achieved on a cinematic grand scale, “Stairway B” is compelling for its blend of actual footage and personal narrative.

To that end, the relatable miracle of “Stairway B” is not so much that the firefighters survived, which defies comprehension, as that they attempted to walk up 90 flights of stairs, in full gear (resting every few floors), in the simmering North Tower to rescue stranded office workers.

It took some an hour to get to the 31st floor. At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed, and Capt. Jay Jonas, on the 21st floor with his men from Ladder 6, decided to turn everyone back. Taking Stairway B, they got down to the lower floors before the North Tower caved, their descent slowed when they picked up an injured office worker, Josephine Harris, who had been hiking down from the 76th floor.

“You could actually hear the floors hitting one another--boom, boom, boom, boom, and I remember thinking to myself, I said, ‘Oh ... this is it, we didn’t make it,’ ” says firefighter Sal D’Agostino of the tower’s collapse.

The narrative is no less compelling when placed alongside the footage assembled from that day. “Countdown to Ground Zero” is a more sweeping and effortful docudrama, and suffers greatly for this. It’s a tick-tock of the night before and day of, and it mixes its metaphors throughout: Testimonials are conjoined with stagy scenes of actors playing various roles, which are in turn supplemented by news footage.

Rick Rescorla, corporate security head for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., died evacuating company workers. Grappling with how to depict this, the producers of “Countdown” kind of don’t choose at all -- blending re-enactments of Rescorla’s actions with interviews with his wife and scenes in which an actress, playing his wife, watches in horror as the TV shows the South Tower collapsing.

Similarly, an interview with the manager of the flight simulation training center in Florida that unwittingly trained hijacker Mohamed Atta is run alongside a scene that depicts Atta getting such training. Another scene depicts John O’Neill, the former FBI counter-terrorism expert on Al Qaeda who had quit in frustration to become head of security at the World Trade Center, dining with friends at Elaine’s on the night of Sept. 10. This scene is accompanied by an interview with one of his actual companions from that evening, who recalled O’Neill voicing his fears about the likelihood of a terrorist attack.

Such re-enactment can illuminate, but more often it feels like harsh juxtaposition and worse, trivializes what actually happened, offering fabrication as clarity.

“Countdown” is upsetting, but sometimes in the wrong way; you feel like a voyeur. Stone, to his credit, is somewhat restrained this way. He doesn’t touch the horrific imagery of the planes hitting the buildings, in large part because the men whose stories he was telling didn’t see this, either.

On some level you have to relate this -- how on that day, truth be told, it all must have been a blur.