Only the Brave
ONLY THE BRAVE, drama based on a true story, rated PG-13, 3.5 chiles
Only the Brave, an engrossing drama that follows the Granite Mountain Hotshots wildland firefighting corps, will alter your core temperature. Don’t schedule anything for immediately after the screening — unless it’s a yoga class or meditation session. You’ll need to cool down.
Some already know the story of the Granite Mountain team, a real-life group of Prescott, Arizona, firefighters that became the first municipal hotshot crew in the nation earlier this decade. Spoilers are available in plenty of other places already, though they will not be revealed here. (The film is inspired by a 2013 GQ piece written by Sean Flynn, and books have been written, too.) But the less one knows, the better.
Flynn’s magazine piece is expertly adapted by veteran screenwriters Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) and Eric Warren Singer. Singer’s been Oscar-nominated for a screenplay once before, for American Hustle. Here, he might share a second nod from the Academy with Nolan: Scenes that might otherwise be rote, and characters that might otherwise serve as bit parts, move with alacrity. Clocking in at more than two hours, the film feels brisker than that. A few clunky moments early on are more than made up for. It’s unclear when exactly the story begins to grip your throat, not to let up until the closing moments, but you’ll be checking your pulse halfway through.
An all-star cast deserves a heap of credit. Josh Brolin leads the hotshots as superintendent Eric Marsh — a good, grizzled, and wise straightshooter of a head coach — and Miles Teller plays a recovering junkie, an unlikely recruit trying to make good for his new daughter. Both mesmerize, Brolin in particular, with performances that exceed their templates. Jeff Bridges, as a laid-back wildland fire chief, continues his career-long streak of never having read a line poorly. Taylor Kitsch plays the crew’s frat-boy heart — driving the all-male crew’s familiar machismo, which remains on the right side of locker-room talk, never veering into Donald Trump on Access Hollywood territory.
No, we don’t pass the Bechdel test here (which asks whether a fictional work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man). But Jennifer Connelly, as Brolin’s on-screen wife, turns in a splendid performance, diluting some of whatever critique might be made there. In short, this technically brilliant heart-pounder, filmed in Santa Fe and its surrounding areas last summer, does not play as a mere disaster film, or battlefield epic, or typical firefighting movie — and perhaps current events have something to do with that. The recent rash of deadly hurricanes, earthquakes — and, most recently in Northern California, horrific wildfires — lends Only the Brave a searing potency: These are the stakes for those who, at the first sign of danger, leap unselfishly into harm’s way. These are their stories. The events depicted — spanning from 2012 to the Yarnell Hill Fire of 2013 — make one of those stories. If our eyes have begun to glaze over at the reams of recent disaster news,
Only the Brave is the corrective. — Tripp Stelnicki