Playing with fire

Noel Vera

Jay Russell's "Ladder 49" is, you might say, his take
on "Backdraft," Ron Howard's 1991 paean to firefighters. There are
differences: "Backdraft" goes to some detail into the nature of
fires--how they're started, how they behave, and how you can
sometimes make them do what you wish them to do; the movie also
presents and photographs the flames in such vividly close detail
(creeping across ceilings, fanning along walls, blooming across the
room in explosive slow motion) that you can almost believe the
assertion that every fire is different, with its own characteristics
and (sometimes) predictable habits--its own "personality," so to
speak.

Unfortunately, the often fascinating wealth of information
in "Backdraft" is overlaid by an implausible "serial arsonist" plot
and by the tiresome melodrama going on in the sidelines; "Ladder 49"
has the virtue of focusing on an ordinary fireman's life (or as much
of that life, I suppose, as can ever be conceived by Hollywood
filmmakers) and its firefighting scenes are accordingly less
elaborate but more realistic, somewhat.

And that's possibly the only flattering remark I can give on the
movie--with no implausible "serial arsonist" to occupy the picture's
dramatic core, the tiresome melodrama moves front and center. We
have Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) as the rookie fireman
undergoing his baptism by fire; we have Mike Kennedy (John Travolta)
as the crusty but wise fire chief; we have Lenny Richter (Robert
Patrick), playing the hard-drinking, hardworking fireman as
unregenerate bastard; we have Linda, Jack's girlfriend and later
wife (Jacinda Barrett), who at one point is squeezed in a tight hug
before she can blurt out "I'm pregnant…!"

We have Jack, searching his soul on the question of whether or not
he should go on being a fireman; we have Mike reminding him in a
fatherly manner that he has a wife and kids; we have the
aforementioned wife, getting angry at Jack for endangering himself
on TV (a news copter caught the footage); we have practical jokes,
drunken binges, temper flare-ups, violent confrontations; we even
have the unregenerate bastard--on whom I had been counting on to
continue giving the proceedings some astringency--redeeming himself
in the course of duty (meaning of course that that's the end of him
as an interesting character, and that he's sidelined for the rest of
the movie).

Cliché is piled on cliché is piled on cliché; Russell knows no
shame, shows no sign of being conscious of the possibility that what
he's showing us is anything less than high and serious drama. He
even drags in a (barely) veiled tribute to 9/11, with a funeral
oration addressed not just to the deceased fireman at hand, but to
all firemen, everywhere--a cheap ploy that diminishes the tragedy of
that day, I think.

The movie's real tragedy--I hesitate to call it a "film"--is that a
good, perhaps even great picture about firefighters is possible from
this material; you need only ask the simple question "what do they
think and feel about their job, and why?" Why do firemen, as someone
asks at one point, run into burning buildings while everyone else is
running out? Joaquin's Jack spends a few moments on the question,
but it's less an occasion for serious probing than a photo-op
moment, to show the audience what a soulful, thoughtful man Jack
really is (the unspoken premise being: "chicks love men who
ask 'what's it all about?'"). I didn't expect a sophisticated
treatise on the psychology of firemen, but I do expect the
filmmakers to have read a thing or two, or at least made a few
shrewd guesses, or at least go beyond the usual bromide of "it's
their job."

I thought one of the more interesting discussions on the subject of
heroism in the line of duty could be found in Tom Wolfe's nonfiction
novel "The Right Stuff." Wolfe suggests that the seven Mercury
astronauts who spearheaded America's space program in the '50s and
early '60s--and test pilots in general, from which most of the
astronauts had come from--put their lives on the line every day
because they possessed enormous psychological resources to do so,
and that these resources included a kind of self-denial of the
reality ("so-and-so died because he didn't do everything he could to
survive"). Robert Patrick's boorish Lenny actually voices this
sentiment, and Jack has to take him to task for it, of course; no
hint of psychological truth must taint our gallant post-9/11
warriors.

Actually, Lenny represents one of the biggest opportunities "Ladder
49" foregoes to focus on the task of canonizing its heroes; he's the
only real drinker in the group, and the only one who actually takes
advantage of the firefighter's trademark charisma to indulge in a
bit of adultery (the movie, for all its sophomoric pranks involving
father confessors, is remarkably free of frank sex talk, or even of
adult sex--John Travolta's Mike is divorced, presumed chaste (not
even a hint or joke that perhaps he uses manual labor); Joaquin
Phoenix's Jack picks up one girl and right away she's his wife
(their sex officially approved by God); all the other men in the
firehouse are either sleeping or drinking or joshing each other in a
manly, non-homoerotic manner--you wonder if maybe these people
believe a night of carnality will take away from their performance
as firefighters). Lenny is the only one who talks and walks and
behaves like most firefighters behave--so naturally he's the movie's
scapegoat (the lines are so clearly drawn you could see the crayon
marks on the floor).

Come to think of it, is it just the melodrama that's the problem?
The first fifty or so minutes of Johnnie To's "Lifeline" (1997),
Hong Kong's attempt at a firefighter movie, trades on similar
claptrap, but the sum effect is more entertaining. It's not just
conviction--you get plenty from the cast of "Ladder"--it's that the
actors in To's movie (Kenneth Chan, a To regular, among others) play
the clichés as if they'd never heard of them before, as if it were
happening to them for the first time, no irony or detachment
whatsoever.

It helps that the storytelling is far less heavy-handed--they're
noble, but they don't insist on that nobility; they're flawed, but
don't dwell on their flaws. To lets them flash their virtues and
vices, then gets on with his story, with as little fuss as possible--
the sooner, presumably, he can arrive at the good stuff: a
tremendous 45-minute long sequence where a group of bad-luck
firefighters try escape a burning textile factory. Talk about
everything except the kitchen sink, the firefighters deal with
flammable material, explosive chemicals, collapsing hallways,
trapped factory workers, and deadly fumes, all on a limited oxygen
supply. It helps that To is a genuinely talented action filmmaker
("The Barefoot Kid;" "A Hero Never Dies;" "Fulltime Killer"); it
also helps that safety standards for both fire prevention and
filmmaking in Hong Kong are nowhere near those of America. Perhaps
one of the most chilling moments in the film show the firefighters
groping about in the building's dark bowels, when suddenly the huge
air ducts that line the ceiling start spewing a thick snowfall of
sinister dust. You wonder if the firefighters are protected or at
least insured against that kind of chemical hazard; then you wonder
if the actors are. The film's final half makes comparable sequences
from both "Backdraft" and "Ladder" look like marshmallow roasts by
comparison.

Getting back to the rather uninspiring subject: "Ladder 49" is
perhaps not the worst film I've seen recently--the competition is
stiff this year--but it's up there. Firefighters--the real ones, who
walk and talk and break wind and exude bad breath just like you and
me--should be insulted by this blatant effort at whitewash.

(First published in Businessworld, 10/15/04)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)