Ladder 49

Any movie can teach us something if we open ourselves to learning, and from Ladder 49 I learn that Baltimore has a thriving Irish community. Who knew? Well, maybe those who hail from Baltimore. But from our two premier Baltimore filmmakers, Barry Levinson and John Waters, we’ve gotten stories focusing on Jews and freaks, respectively — not a St. Paddy’s Day pub scene anywhere in their combined filmographies. For a long while, I sat through Ladder 49 expecting it to be set somewhere obvious like Boston, except that I heard no glaringly fake Boston accents. By setting up shop in Baltimore, of all places, and playing up the Irish angle, the movie stakes a claim to uniqueness in at least one respect.

Otherwise, this is a fairly routine firefighter drama, with burning-building sequences that more or less all look alike. In Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991), the previous major firefighter movie, the fires had personality; the flames were sneaky, seductive, deadly. The fires in Ladder 49 look too neatly art-directed, as if you were watching Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, and the rest of the cast stumble around a Universal Studios theme ride. Fancy editing and clever angles do all the work; we never feel as if the characters — or we — are really in there among the flames, and in a movie that’s supposed to be paying tribute to those who risk their lives, that’s a rather large liability.

The script, by Lewis Colick, is a bit too neat, too. We follow rookie fireman Jack Morrison (Phoenix) from his first time down the fire pole (a nice POV shot that gives us false hope that the subsequent scenes will have some you-are-there excitement) to his later days as an established and respected firefighter who’s saved quite a few lives, one on live TV. Because Hollywood fears we won’t care about a childless bachelor, Jack is promptly set up with a cute blonde wife (Jacinda Barrett) and two darling kids (one girl, one boy). We are, thankfully, spared the scene where Jack misses an important birthday party or dance recital because he’s busy dousing flames, but we do get the scene where Jack’s wife frets about his safety and nudges him to take a desk job. To which an attentive viewer might say, “Lady, he had this gig when you met him, remember? It’s not like he was a librarian who suddenly decided to go fight fires.”

John Travolta works hard to redeem his scenes as the sloppy but caring Mike Kennedy, the captain and father figure of the firehouse. He’s introduced snoozing at his desk with an unlit cigar in his paw; you sense, however, that Mike slacks off everywhere but on a fire site, where he’s crisp and authoritative. As he has aged and filled out, Travolta, wiry and somewhat high-strung in his youth, has puffed into a relaxed Buddha whose presence seems to chill out everyone around him. He sells a couple of emotional speeches after a couple of the men have fallen to the flames; a few years ago the movie might have been his story, but the film is carried by Joaquin Phoenix, who might be better suited to scene-stealing supporting roles in big Hollywood movies than to lead roles. Phoenix is the sort of actor who can make villains interesting and likable despite themselves, but can’t do much with a hero who seems to have been written as a cautiously dull family man and courageous fireman. And the movie’s flashback structure (Jack remembers most of the movie while awaiting rescue in a gutted, fiery building) kills whatever momentum Phoenix’s performance might have built up.

Ladder 49 has been all-too-consciously constructed as a salute to the men (no female firefighters in this movie — shh, don’t tell Caroline Paul) who offer their lives in the literal line of fire, not only on a daily basis but on 9/11. The movie bends over backwards to depict firemen as great guys who play hilarious pranks on each other and throw elaborate birthday parties for each other’s kids. That may be, but it doesn’t make for a terribly meaty film. Two other projects, the Denis Leary black-comic TV series Rescue Me and Peter Berg’s still-unmade fireman-heist film Truck 44 (said to be sidelined out of “respect” after 9/11), might do a better job of showing firemen warts and all — what’s wrong with showing some greedy, loutish, disagreeable firemen who can still pull it together and save lives when necessary? That they all have to be nice guys on top of being heroes is laying it on a little thick, and is beside the point. How about a movie that points out how the budgets of first-responder teams — police and emergency medical teams as well as firefighters — have been slashed under the current administration? Any of the above would honor your local fire department far more than a nicey-nice tearjerker like Ladder 49 does.

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