Dignified tribute to undersung heroes
Only the Brave
12a cert, 133 min
Dir Joseph Kosinski Starring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, Andie Macdowell
It’s that time of year when epics of American sacrifice, heaving with rugged masculine emotion, infallibly come around. Peter Berg gave us a trilogy of said spectacles with Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day – all belonging to a species of film that honour the fallen, with long, stirring end-credit montages featuring photos of the men (and they are almost all men) whose real-life fatalities we’re here to commemorate.
Only the Brave, about a crew combating wildfires in the Arizona scrub, is not by Peter Berg, and inexplicably doesn’t star Mark Wahlberg, but it follows in the wake of these films with scrupulous tact, and if anything dials the bombast down a notch. It’s certainly not peddling the blazing melodrama of Ron Howard’s Backdraft – the last major American film about firefighting, unless you count 2004’s Ladder 49.
This one has solid merits, a committed cast, and a respectful determination to show us what the day-to-day of an important, undersung job might be like – in fact, it doesn’t enter disaster-movie territory at all until the last half-hour. It’s a slow lament, in no hurry to dramatise the day of crisis before acquainting us properly with the guys involved.
They are a 20-strong team led by Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin), a veteran of his craft and compassionate superintendent, whom the film also sells to us as something of a pyroprophet – able to gaze off at distant mountains and make shamanistically exact calls on how fast a fire is spreading, and to where.
It’s a credit to Brolin’s supremely reliable, feet-on-the-ground screen authority that this stuff comes off in any way credibly. The script, cowritten by Black Hawk Down’s Ken Nolan and American Hustle’s Eric Warren Singer, positions Eric as Hero Number One, not least for the helping hand he reaches out to Brendan (Miles Teller), a recovering crack addict trying to turn his life around.
Brendan starts out as a charity case and low-level criminal, with a pregnant ex-girlfriend who wants as little as possible to do with him. He’s also a dropout from the emergency services, with some way to go in catching up with his mocking colleagues on fitness runs, not to mention remembering the all-important commandments of their trade.
Teller gives him a growing humility that anchors the film appealingly, and he doesn’t overdo the junkie showboating, which is something of a relief. He’s helped a lot by Taylor Kitsch, as the guy least likely to accept this broken newcomer into the fold. Kitsch is some kind of cast standout here, doing good, sardonic work underneath a scuzzy ’tache that gives him a passing resemblance to Sam Rockwell. The back-and-forth between these two, with hostility turned to friendship via hazing rituals, is the best thing in the script: it’s certainly a fresher element than Jennifer Connelly’s part. As the horse-rancher wife of Brolin’s character, she doesn’t get much to do except stand around waiting for another angry speech every reel or two, while her bonding moments with Teller over their past of addiction have more than a residual whiff of pure Hollywood corn.
As for Jeff Bridges, his role as a retired fire chief dispensing advice from his front porch is utterly default Bridgesing: pop on a cowboy hat, phone in drawled tips on horseback, and – why not? – waddle down to the local tavern for a Crazy Heart
It feels like a ‘National Geographic’ cover-shoot in movie form, as reverential on the landscape as on the loss of life
singalong midway. He’s helping the films from the sidelines, perhaps because the director is his old Tron: Legacy maestro Joseph Kosinski, whose direction – too slow, but good in other ways – is a refreshing switch-up from the Berg template. He’s got gifted young composer Joseph Trapanese on side, and reunites with Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi’s cinematographer, who does beautiful things with colour, as he did on Tron.
The climax lacks detail and human immediacy – it’s as if the film is scared to make any tasteless steps as it heads cautiously into the memorial phase. But the sight of trees set intentionally ablaze, tumbling off a mountainside and into low-lying mist, make it feel, in a good way, like a National Geographic cover-shoot in movie form, as reverential on the landscape as on the loss of life.