Ladder 49
Touchstone Pictures
Starring: John Travolta, Joaquin Phoenix and Robert Patrick
The Verdict: “Ladder” offers sincere, heart-warming look at life, tragedy and truimph.
Rated PG-13 for intense fire and rescue situations, and for language.
3 stars of 4 stars
A firefighter and his date are sharing drinks at a bar when the young lady marvels, “You go into burning buildings when everyone else is running out.”
The young man takes a beat. “That’s the job,” he replies.
The young man’s name is Jack Morrison, and he’s the hero of “Ladder 49,” an old-fashioned firefighting drama from director Jay Russell (“My Dog Skip”) and writer Lewis Colick (“October Sky”). With that combo behind the camera, it’s no wonder that the film is sentimental, predictable and overly (post-9/11) reverent of its subject. It’s also no wonder, though, that “Ladder 49” is pretty darn good in its own humble way.
The film has the feel and structure of a 1940’s war saga. It’s got a present-day story built around a series of extended flashbacks, and it’s all about men facing their destinies, uniting in brotherhood against a common enemy and fighting like hell to win battles in the name of good. In the ’40s the enemy was the Axis powers; today it’s four-alarm fires, and Baltimore firemen take the place of generals and foot soldiers.
The present-day story begins as Jack (Joaquin Phoenix) and the guys of Ladder 49 respond to a call at a blazing 20-story building. Jack splits with the rest of his crew to look for survivors on the 12th floor. He lowers one man to safety out of a window, but an explosion causes the floor to collapse before Jack can lower himself. After a nasty fall, Jack is trapped. While his chief and mentor Mike looks on and organizes efforts to save him, Jack slips in and out of consciousness and in and out of the flashbacks that make up the bulk of this two-hour film.
In flashback the audience finds out that Jack’s a dedicated worker and a good sport when it comes to firehouse pranks (like someone suddenly dousing him with ice water or inexplicably hiding a live goose in his locker). You see who he is on the job and off, and you get a feel for the important relationships in his life, particularly with his wife, another good sport who can drink with the guys and live stoically with a husband who may not even come home at the end of the day.
Jack’s remembrances play a little like Cliffs Notes, hitting all the big movie moments you’d expect in a fireman’s life from his first day on the job to the loss of his first co-worker to the day his first child is born. You know where “Ladder 49” is headed and all the stops along the way, but credit Russell and Colick that you want to keep watching.
Phoenix also does a lot of the film’s heavy lifting, grounding Jack in an effortless decency that makes audiences want to follow him anywhere. Phoenix makes a convincing fireman, a guy who knows what must be done and does it without thinking to say no. Although he may have one too many scenes of lip-quivering grief, Phoenix is appealingly sensitive as well. Jack would run straight into the jaws of hell if his job demanded it, but he’s paralyzed with fear when he visits a hospitalized comrade.
And John Travolta gives his best performance in over five years as Mike, the firehouse’s level-headed Zen master. Mike’s the kind of guy who’ll, out of the goodness of his heart, take time out to read “Beauty and the Beast” to a co-worker’s kids. He’s totally engaged in his men as long as he needs to be and then moves on, and Travolta reads the character with an appealing degree of well-worn tranquility. Mike flies off the handle once in the film, snapping harshly when grieving firemen start picking fights with each other on the night of a co-worker’s death. Travolta’s rage flirts with laughable overblow, but the actor pulls back perfectly for a flustered and heartbreaking delivery of the line, “Anyone think of lowering the flag?”
“Ladder 49” is littered with clichs that don’t chafe as much as they might.
Robert Patrick, for instance, play’s the unit’s resident A-hole, a crusty, uppity sort who twice recites Danny Glover’s chestnut catchphrase from the “Lethal Weapon” movies (you know the one: it starts with “I’m getting too old…”). Yet, despite his shortcomings, Patrick is also the house’s mascot, dressing up as Santa at Christmastime and playing the pivotal role of over-inquisitive priest in the firehouse’s rookie hazing prank. He’s a jerk, but not because the plot needs him to be; he’s a jerk because that’s who he is.
The film eschews clichs with unforced authenticity. The life of a firefighter isn’t all alarms and flames, and “Ladder 49” refreshingly shows downtime at the firehouse. The guys joke around like pledges at a frathouse, march in parades, nurse beers at the corner bar and make trips to the grocery store. When they talk, they talk like real people. They have their own vernacular (“steppies,” “truckies,” etc.), but Colick never makes the words seem mystically important.
Russell adds to reality with little flourishes of grit that are notable for feeling organic instead of look-at-this flashy. When Jack slides down the pole and jumps on the truck for the first time, it’s shot in a shaky point-of-view shot. When firemen rush to a fire, they have to deal with traffic or the slushy streets left by a dissipating snowstorm. “Ladder 49” has several firefighter fatalities, of course, but Russell makes them genuinely horrifying. The episodes are quick, brutal and unexpected, and no character who dies has been previously marked for death with awkward plot threads or lingering close-ups.
The director shoots the film in a no-nonsense style that emphasizes the incongruity of fire to the rest of the manmade environment. There are gorgeous frames of cascading hose-water and swelling infernos, but Russell is wise to underplay the imagery here. The film’s fire footage feels wholly natural (unlike in Ron Howard’s fetishistic “Backdraft;” no Donald Sutherland rasping “The fire looked at you!” in this movie), with several blazes occurring in un-cinematic broad daylight.
Firefighting is a job. You don’t fight fires because you love fire; you do it to help people. “Ladder 49” soberly examines the personal losses that go hand in hand with such public selflessness. The film imagines what it must feel like to leave for work in the morning without knowing if you’ll return in one piece. In this line of work, on-the-job heroics can make your wife upset at you.
There’s a great moment early in “Ladder 49” that shows the guys leaping to action to respond to an alarm. The men suit up, the fire truck peels out onto the street, but Russell’s camera stays behind. The audience sees the empty house, the overturned chairs, the still-smoking cigarette butts left behind. These guys all have their own lives, their own loves, but when a call comes in, they live only to serve. In one flicker of time, their lives can change, even end, in the sevice of people they’ve never met before or will again.
In detailing the sacrifices of a firefighter, I’ve grown overly sentimental, a sin which “Ladder 49” is also guilty of from time to time. Sometimes Jack and his buddies are less heroic than superheroic, and sometimes William Ross’s weepy underscore becomes telegraphic overscore. The movie is filled with potential “aw shucks” moments, but they don’t play out as cheaply as you dread they will. Jack’s fate in the climactic fire could have been played for thin melodrama, but the increasing hopelessness of the situation and the growing resignation in Travolta’s and Phoenix’s eyes generates real poignancy.
Thankfully, “Ladder 49” is not the big dumb action it’s being advertised as.
True, the film isn’t unusually thoughtful, nor does it cover any new ground within its genre. It does, however, cover its ground well. Ultimately, this is an optimistic film that believes in positive legacies and the goodness in human nature. It argues that life can go back to normal after tragedy as long as you redirect your mourning to a celebration of the lives lost instead of a tome for them. It’s life that firemen fight everyday to preserve, not possessions or property. “Ladder 49” is as flawed as life itself, but it’s sincere, warm and uplifting. It makes you want to hug the next fireman you see. Or at the very least, talk his ear off and buy him a beer.