Like Moths to Flame
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood capitalized on the sympathy and admiration that envel-oped the nation’s firefighters after 9/11, and here we are. Jay Russell’s action-packed, flame-broiled Ladder 49, an all-out valentine to the firehouse fraternity, might never have gotten to the screen were it not for the tragic sacrifice hundreds of New York City firefighters made when the World Trade Center towers came crashing down three years ago. Social surveys consistently rank firefighting as one of the most esteemed occupations in the land, and any reasonably competent movie celebrating the bravery of the guys in the helmets is bound to be a slam-dunk at the box office.
Ladder 49 needs all the public goodwill it can get. It’s good with mayhem — the exciting action sequences include a rat-infested tenement exploding like a bundle of matchsticks and a daring rescue on the vertical face of a burning skyscraper — but it’s pretty weak in terms of actual human behavior. The Baltimore firemen we meet here (and they are all men) don’t even curse. The signature white-marble stoops and the skyline may look the same, but these guys are apparently living in a city completely different from the down-and-dirty Baltimore of the HBO series The Wire.
Oh, well. As heroes go, we could probably do worse than bulky, thick-necked Joaquin Phoenix with a hose nozzle clamped in his fist. Phoenix has a club fighter’s rough mug and the rolling, athletic gait of a linebacker; he’s just the right physical type to portray Jack Morrison, a young idealist who joins the department because it’s the right thing to do. Jack’s a modest guy — too much acting out wouldn’t do — but he clearly takes great satisfaction in getting a terrified businessman down from his burning office and snatching up a teenager overcome by smoke inhalation. “Trust me,” he yells. Everyone trusts him.
If Jack is here to save lives, his guardian angel, Mike Kennedy (John Travolta), is here to impart wisdom. Jack’s captain, and later his chief, Kennedy is the kind of screw-the-rules mentor who keeps an open bottle of Bushmills on his shambles of a desk and wanders around the firehouse in his boxer shorts. But when it comes to upholding honor and instilling team spirit, he’s your man. Travolta’s not entirely convincing — he never seems quite right in a uniform — but he provides star power.
The movie begins with a horrific warehouse fire that dumps Jack into a filthy well of rubble, then relies on a series of flashbacks while he awaits rescue. In those, we see the progress of his career — his early days as a green rookie getting hazed by the old hands, his baptism of fire, his mostly happy marriage (Jacinda Barrett is the long-suffering wife), the joys of fatherhood, his development into a brave and trusted department veteran. Director Russell (My Dog Skip) and writer Lewis Colick (October Sky) go for the usual boys-must-bond stuff (the fire department, too, is a secret society steeped in pranks and rituals), and they don’t blink at tragedy (two firemen die, and another is grotesquely burned). But what they really seem to be after is moral uplift with a coating of noble grime.
Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with Russell and Colick’s brass-bound conviction that these are heroes, hard-working, hard-drinking civil servants buoyed by machismo and fellowship. But Ladder is much less a drama of the streets than a kind of recruiting film, perfectly tuned to a moment in our history when firefighters are regarded as household saints. It’s easy to imagine Denis Leary beaming it on the wall at his Firefighters Foundation, then passing the hat. Backdraft had more spectacular pyrotechnics, and the lavish 1970s disaster flick The Towering Inferno featured the potent star duo of Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. But Ladder 49 takes the blue ribbon for sheer veneration of its subjects. For that, it’s consistently admirable — and just a bit dull.
