Ladder 49 isn't as much cheese as it's skim milk. It's watery stuff, mild in both how it tastes and how it digests. You remember that Pauline Kael essay about "Fear of Movies"? The "fear of movies" crowd is filled with well-meaning liberals who would rather have no sensation at all than an unpleasant one. She recommended Carrie or Jaws to them, and they made a sour face at the suggestion. They don't like seeing blood in movies. Kael writes that they hiss at it "like they don't have it in their bodies.” The movie isn't really boring, it's just... blah. The only offense you can take from the film, really, is that it is utterly inoffensive. Ladder 49 is not too salty, and not the least bit bitter or sour. It's a little sweet of course, and very warm. There is a slight aftertaste after drinking it in, but it passes quickly. The mildly pleasurable sensation isn't from the flavor, there really isn't any, but from the temperature. Ladder 49 is perfect for people who think that the world that they inhabit is harsh and corrupt, and the movies are also full of pornographic sex and violence. Actually, these people are probably worse than Kael's friends. The "fear of movies” crowd Kael described were at least pro-sex; she noted that they liked a good light and worthless French sex comedy. Sex is too scary for the Ladder 49 people. When a couple in Ladder 49 has to have sex (and this is between the hero and his fiance), they modestly undress, get under the covers and kiss. And then the screen FADES TO BLACK!!! Like in a Code-era movie! The film is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for "intense fire and rescue situations, and for language.” It didn't meet the standards of the ChildCare Action Project; they also had some serious problems with the drinking and that chaste sex scene. I cannot imagine a film made about firemen that's more sanitary than this one. It would have to star either Thomas the Tank Engine or Fisher-Price figurines.

You know what the movie reminded me of? God's Army. I'm not sure if you have heard of God's Army if you live outside of Utah; it seems that it played in several major cities for a spell and when it went to video many chains added it to their library. It's a Mormon movie that follows the adventures of a young missionary from Kansas who finds himself stationed in Los Angeles. Ladder 49 on the other hand is about a young firefighter starting out at a new fire station in Baltimore. It is utterly bizarre how many scenes are shared between the two pictures. Ladder 49's fire station greatly resembles the mission in God's Army. Lots of pranks get played on the new guy. Then later in the film he gets to play all the same gags on another new guy. Both films employ a prank where they embarrass one of their comrades while they're on the toilet, though to be sure the one in God's Army is slightly more innocuous. The firefighters and missionaries are "brothers" in the most literal sense of the word; male bonding is sanctioned as a basic, if infantile, affection. If there is a difference between the two camps, I suppose it's that the firefighters go to bars to drink beer and instead of sanctioning homophobia in their doctrine they simply incorporate it in their constant joshing. The difference is mostly cosmetic to tell you the truth.

In both Ladder 49 and God's Army, the newcomer finds love through his new vocation. This wouldn't be out of the unusual except that the girls that they fall in love with look alike! Check it out, here's Jacinda Barrett from Ladder 49. And here's Jacque Gray from God's Army. Okay, maybe Barrett is a little prettier in the face, more baby fat and fewer sharp angles than Gray. But check out that hair! Same primped style and same strawberry blonde color. They both have that same Midwestern farmer's daughter quality. Domestic and utterly non-threatening despite some feeble attempts of the screenwriters in both films to make them a little bit tough and independent, these women basically seem to exist to keep the home fires burning while the men go and do manly things. They're good Mormon girls, what Cheech Marin in From Dusk Till Dawn described as "apple pie pussy.” (There is part of me feels shame for saying that about Gray as I imagine some poor soul will do a Google search on her name and get that in return. Yeah, you know what, dude? Freedom of speech!) And what's the deal with the names of the actresses anyway? Jacinda and Jacque? Is it cosmic fate that both the love interests of Ladder 49 and God's Army would be played by actresses with oddly exotic names beginning with the same three letters? I'm probably projecting a bit on God's Army actually; what was it that he said in the ending voiceover? Did the wife become an author? I remember in any case that she was either pregnant or had already popped one or two out and she was faithfully bringing her hubbie a cup of hot chocolate. In Ladder 49 we see life between the newcomer firefighter (Joaquin Phoenix, by the by) and the wife after marriage. I suppose the film deserves some credit for that; in God's Army they quit at happily ever after. But it seems to confirm that the girl doesn’t have any life of her own independent of the kids and husband. What does she do for a living? What did she do before she met Phoenix? Either they don’t tell us or I don’t remember. That is never really an issue worthy of consideration in Ladder 49.

Meh, but I don’t want to complain too much about the Stepfordian social conservatism of women’s roles in the Mormon God’s Army”and the pseudo-Mormon Ladder 49. It’s been done, and that’s not exactly my complaint with Ladder 49/God’s Army anyway. There is a montage in God's Army showing the missionaries going door to door to pass the word and having the door slammed in their face. Ladder 49 does something similar in having a woman, having set off a false alarm, refuse to let them in to check things out. They're setting up some "comic" deglamorization of the job. They're showing how it's basically grunt work for a largely indifferent and unappreciative public. People die in both of these movies. In Ladder 49, obviously, it's on the job. The characters question at some point if what they are doing has any purpose or if they're just fools. Briefly though, just enough to thicken the broth a little bit. Now that is my problem with God's Army/Ladder 49. They only give us a hint of darkness and scrub away at anything that may lead the material to some genuinely uncomfortable moments. Without any of the shadows these films lack both depth and texture. They are not thoughtful, they are not moving, they inhibit the sort of reflection that we expect, need, maybe even just hope for from a serious film about missionaries and/or firefighters.

Right after seeing Ladder 49 I saw Mr. 3000 which was probably much better, but similarly weak and forgettable. I was taken aback though to see Stephanie Zacharek on Salon.com give it a RAVE. A RAVE; she thought it was one of the best films of the year. In her review she preempts surface criticism of the film saying that yes, this is basically the same old story that you've seen a million times before: the lovably crotchety grinch finds his heart. Check. But then she says that Bernie Mac and Angela Bassett give terrific performances. Check, I didn't credit this that much while watching it, but she makes a very convincing case. But does this redeem the movie? I don't really think so. Zacharek seems to think that it's best that they just do this material well. That they don't condescend to the audience and don't turn it into something that it's not. That seems to me to be more of a criterion for a competent film, not a particularly successful one. For a long while I thought of great film as akin to a great drug. It goes beyond the idea of "entertainment.” Great films get you high. Under this criteria, movies like God's Army, Ladder 49 and Mr. 3000 still fail miserably. They're cut with a hell of a lot of baking soda. Generally this is a pretty good way of separating the wheat from the chaff. You know, a good movie should push you back a little and get you to say, "Fuck, that was a movie.” Lately though I've found that I don't really reach for "drug" movies when I want to see a movie. I still love them, but yeah, I don't find myself reaching for the Malick when I casually want to see a good movie. You've got it out of me. More interesting to me of late are films made by people who have some sort of critical opinion toward their subject matter. This isn't to say a message film. I don't like message films either. Comparing message films to critical films is, in fact, a lot like comparing "entertainment" (i.e. amusing) films to drug films. We're in the same ballpark, but that isn't quite what I'm getting at. What I'm saying is that a great movie about vampires would have done some serious thinking about what vampires mean and what values are represented in doing a movie about vampires. Not only this, but I think that they need to feel that vampires are at least sort of cool so they can rack up some points on the "drug movie" scale. Kill Bill was a great movie. It got you really high, and it had an opinion, a perspective, on women and on violence. This is what I think of as a great work of art, it places the surrounding world into some sort of context. God's Army/Ladder 49 could hardly be thought to be great art in this sense. The films have no real perspective. If anything, they are simply comfortable confirmations of this material. The question if they are done well is irrelevant.

What is it that they are bringing to the table? The filmmakers are guilty of making utterly worthless films. If you go to see Ladder 49 or you support God's Army however, you are likely guilty of a greater crime. R-rated films are forbidden for most Latter Day Saints as they could produce impure thoughts. This is idiotic; the PG-13-rated Austin Powers: Goldmember is as impure as any film I have ever seen, but it's workable. I find that pre-MPAA movies are popular among several of the Latter Day Saints, but they like stuff with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Nobody really argues in favor of stuff like Touch of Evil, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Kiss Me Deadly or Night of the Hunter. None of those movies are rated R, but if you have seen them I can assure you that you are as cool if not cooler than those who regularly do watch rated-R movies. It is not required that you watch obscenity to be a cineaste, and so you have to excuse for celebrating meaningless garbage like Ladder 49! You just don't need to! I'm meaning to criticize Ladder 49 by treating it like a Mormon film, but I wish I could be praising it by doing so. Andrew Niccol, writer/director of the brilliant Gattaca, the intelligent if flawed S1m0ne, and writer only of the intelligent if significantly flawed The Truman Show is wonderfully square. I think that Niccol is great, every bit as exciting as somebody like Todd Solondz or Wes Anderson. People complained that S1m0ne lacked bite as a satire. Yes it did, that was certainly one of the most attractive things about it; Niccol didn't have the capacity to be cruel. He didn't know the words. And Gattaca showed semblances of LDS theology, arguing that we are not born flawed but unfinished. See, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for. I'm praying for a Mormon Martin Scorsese. I mean, why not? Why can't we see Mormonism in terms of a social, philosophical and religious background instead of simply a clubhouse or a sanctuary. Why do Mormon movies have to be so fucking stupid, concerned more with what they left out than what they put in? The pathetic thing is that God's Army is really not that much better or worse than something like The Singles Ward (basically another standard-issue crappy romantic comedy, only it takes place in Salt Lake and the characters are LDS and thus has some sort of novelty value) which for some reason the local critics really hated. God's Army doesn't go anywhere and never breaks any new ground either.

So why make a film about firemen into a pseudo-Mormon movie? I think that I agree with The Onion's Nathan Rabin that the film seems to be stuck in September 12th mode. It didn't seem to go into production until after September 11th, when the producers and screenwriter decided that the firemen were really great heroes and deserved to have a love letter written to them. America has since moved on. Utahns probably quicker than others perhaps because, as my mother out east explained to me, we didn't see the corpses being dragged out of the rubble. For most of us, September 11th existed mostly as a cognitive concept. We felt the waves, but nah, it didn't really effect most of us too much. I don't think I ever shared the mindset that Ladder 49 was possibly made under (save a tingle of guilt provoked by Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow of all things) and so I really have close to no sympathy for it, much less three years after the fact. Understand that Ladder 49 is not exploitive of this mindset. It's a genuine piece of hero worship by people who mean it. That isn't a good reason to see it though; for people who put little flags up on the car and dressed their kids as firemen for Halloween but have since risen from the funk, it could be positively humiliating to watch.

Ladder 49 has a non-traditional structure. Phoenix gets stuck in a burning building in the beginning of the movie. The rest of the movie is handled through flashbacks and is told in a linear fashion although from time to time we will come back to Phoenix trying to get out of his predicament. Screenwriting guru Syd Mead says that you shouldn't attempt to put flashbacks in your film unless "you are a genius like Woody Allen (Annie Hall)". I wouldn't quite go that far, but understand that the straight-line narrative has evolved that way for a reason. You remember Jurassic Park right? Chaos theory? Nature is a complex system and if we try to replicate it the slightest change could set into motion an unpredictable chain of events. You know, butterfly flaps its wings in South America and causes a hurricane. And so, if you are going to change the system you have to have a damn good reason. You have to understand what you are doing. Under the death knell set by the first scenes of the film, there is the implication in the film that firefighters exist to die in fires. The film has him choose death, it has him walkie-talkie in and say that we wants to die in there. It makes sense in the context of the film; that's not what I'm getting at. I'm saying that there is a Christ-like masochism at work here, that his mission as firefighter will not be complete without his death.

Curiously, we never find out who Phoenix was before he became a firefighter. He walks into the station, a man literally without a past. He has no family aside from the one he creates. He has no brothers or parents, aside from, I suppose, the surrogates in the fire station. The film doesn't dare suggest that he's an orphan though; it refuses to flesh out the character by suggesting that his profession is borne out of anything short of selflessness, just as it refuses to inhabit the anxious arguments with his wife over risking his life or any of these doubts provoked by the injuring of his friend. They're just thickening the broth a little; the film doesn't want to regard him as a human being, flawed or otherwise. I think that it wants him to be a firefighter, which according to the film it seems, is several steps removed from a human being. Phoenix seems to be like a construct plucked from Last Year at Marienbad or “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” He didn't exist before the movie started and of course he doesn't exist after it. And to think that the film was actually praised for having well-developed characters! This isn’t a film about men who just happen to be firemen; it’s simply about The Firemen. They do not eat, breathe or sleep in any other context. The kids are The Fireman’s kids, the wife is the The Fireman’s wife, et cetera. None of The Firemen ever really develop any sort of individual status; they exist only in the collective. Ladder 49 wears its superficiality like a chastity belt. Again, I have no problem with superficial movies per se but mixed with a sanitary milquetoast aesthetic, the superficiality becomes a problem. The firefighting sequences are dull, of course, lest that pseudo-Mormon skim milk blandness be compromised. See, if the film fetishized the fireman suits and the fire and raised the firefighters into knights charging into the inferno, then we may be onto something. That may take some balls, and they may look absurd, but I’m not sure they would look any more absurd than they do now. Here both the firefighters and the fires they fight are deglamorized and made to look like a job; we hardly ever get any inkling about why these fires exist. There is no symbolism or meaning behind them; they’re just fires. The film takes all the chaff of deification and leaves the wheat. See, it’s one or the other. If you want to make firefighting into a tough job, but we love those who do it, you need to take the time to develop your characters. If you want to transform your firefighters into mythical heroes, you need to give us some mythmaking. We need a cinematic movie, a get-you-high-on-film sort of film. Ladder 49 does neither.

And yet, I have to confess that there is some sort of appeal to this kind of fluff. Yeah, I understand why you would want to escape to Pleasantville where it is always seventy degrees outside and there is no war and there is no hunger and things are just so much simpler. There is a sense where films like Ladder 49 operate like a warm cocoon, isolating you from the cold world and actual thought. I won’t deny that it’s pleasurable, but it should be something that you feel guilty about. It should be an indulgence. The repugnant thing about Ladder 49/God’s Army is that they are simply substituting one indulgence (cleanliness) for many others (sex and violence), and yet are still considered to be doing something that is somehow noteworthy.