![]() ![]() Maybe they only exist to register with the relative few who knew them. So, yes, maybe the audience gets them mixed up. The idea seems to be to make these characters instantly recognizable to their friends and families - even if they only have a line or a silly bit of business in the film. If your guy rocked a ginger beard, you rock a ginger beard. If your guy had a pornstache, then you have a pornstache. For whatever reasons, this is who the Granite Mountain Hotshots were - a sequence in the closing credits makes it clear that the filmmakers wanted to cast actors who resembled the real people they were playing. Why are there no Latinos on this Arizona-based team? Why are there no blacks? No women? Why are they all (presumably) straight young white males? Why do so many of them have dark hair and mustaches?Īll such objections are defeated by the facts. Were Only the Brave a pure fiction, we might complain that there are too many characters to keep track of, and that a lot of them look too much alike. He also earns a place in his daughter's life and a measure of redemption. But in the teasing, harassing and squabbling way of male homosocial institutions, Donut eventually makes his bones and is accepted as a valuable member of the team. As with Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, Donut - his nickname - has nowhere else to go.Īt first, the firefighters are suspicious of the screw-up in their midst - their lives and maybe more importantly their impending certification depend on the weakest link. And so recovering junkie and petty criminal Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller), sobered by the birth of his daughter and needing something honest and hard to devote himself to, gets his second chance. ![]() Meanwhile, he's got to fill the empty slots on his team. So he seeks out the fire chief (Jeff Bridges, also excellent) to help the team negotiate the politics. In an early scene, he watches helplessly as his advice is ignored and a wildfire engulfs a residential complex. And it's frustrating to Marsh, who is presented as having a deep instinctual understanding of fire's ways. This causes them recruiting problems - many of the team's best members jump to other outfits in order to be closer to the action. When the film opens in 2005, the Prescott, Ariz.-based team led by Eric Marsh (a terrific Josh Brolin) is only an aspiring Hotshot crew while awaiting certification (being delayed for political reasons) they're relegated to Type II mitigation work, clearing brush far from the front lines and mopping up behind the Hotshot heroes. ![]() Hotshots are elite crews of firefighters who engage wildfires at their front lines with shovels and rakes and chainsaws and other tools that seem particularly ill-suited to their task (they literally fight fire with fire). That's because the true story of the doomed Granite Mountain Hotshots is compelling enough to overcome most objections. While we might quibble here and there with the choices made by director Joseph Kosinski - the highly visual, somewhat technocratic intelligence behind such cool fantasies as TRON: Legacy and the 2013 Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion - the greater point is that the movie will connect on a deeper level than almost any other movie we might see this year. That is reason enough for any movie to exist, and any discussion of the relative artistic merits of the film ought to acknowledge that by any measure Only the Brave is successful storytelling. Rating: PG-13, for thematic content, some sexual references, language and drug material 88 Cast: Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, Andie MacDowell, Scott Haze, Alex Russell, Ben Hardy, Rachel Singer, Natalie Hall, Geoff Stults, Jake Picking
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