Page 261

Ladder 49 Subhash K Jha
Movie
Ladder 49
Director
Jay Russell
Cast
Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett

By Subhash K Jha

Rating: ***
For those hoping to see John Travolta once again occupy centrestage with grimacing glory, Ladder 49 is disappointing. For once Travolta’s role is so straitlaced, any decently talented character-actor could have done the role.

Travolta makes the role of the fire-chief extremely special. One could carry this further to say the film is special not because it has anything extraordinary to say but because it tells a predictable, often hackneyed story of valour, dignity and working-class ethics in a manner that’s inspiring and intimate.

Director Jay Russell doesn’t pull punches in telling us the story of the hazardous life of fire fighters in a small US town. Russell has earlier rustled up another film about working-class dignity. In his debut film End Of Line in 1988, Russell showed how trite can be awfully right if placed within a proper ethical perspective.

In Ladder 49 Jay Russell again goes for the kind of treatment that leaves ample scope in the narration to play with ideas of wrong and right within the rhythms and patterns of everyday life. The life of the protagonist Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix)is admirable in the way it reflects the truth about professionals who work thanklessly to keep society whole and healed.

This a film about the unsung heroes that makes you want to sing hosannas for the spirit of simplicity and elegance that it embraces with such enchanting lack of affectation. For a while you watch this film with no expectations building up within you.

Every character and situation is predictably conceived. And therein lies the film’s beauty. Designed as a series of flashbacks of happier times while Jack Morrison trapped and buried in a raging fire, recalls his life from recruitment in the fire services to his marriage with a girl (Jacinda Barrett) he meets at a supermarket, to the growing tensions caused in his family life by the inherent tensions in his profession- the narration gives us no reason to expect anything remotely unforeseen.

Somewhere in the first fifteen minutes you warm up to the film’s comfortable tensions, fall in rhythm with plot’s profile of crisp courage.

There have been other films about the valour behind the clamour and glamour of seemimgly gritty professions. Ladder 49 goes beyond the screeching sirens of fire engines,but only to a point. It retains the cinematic quality in the theme without sacrificing the brutal reality.

Joaquin Phoenix, who’s proving to be one of the versatile working-class actors of the post de Niro generation, is perfectly cast as the fire fighter. His struggle to come to grips with the contradictions and tensions of his profession is portrayed with an endearing warmth and sincerity.

Travolta plays a suitable boss. And the lump-in-the-throat finale where Morrison goes down under in the line of duty is steered into a stunning sentimental celebration of cinematic melodrama.

Though the film doesn’t really glorify the fire fighter’s life, there’s one heart-in-the-mouth aerial shot where Morrison rescues a man trapped in a high rise. That sequence is shot with an expertise that complements the narration’s theme without standing out in flamboyantly.

Ladder 49 is a slight but engaging film. Not exemplary but certainly a homage to the spirit of courage under fire.