Film review: “Only the Brave”

Though it’s billed as a biographical drama, “Only the Brave” is as scary as any Halloween horror flick. The ominous mood starts when wildland fire supervisor Eric “Supe” Marsh (Josh Brolin), reaches a peak on a training run with a new batch of firefighters and tells them: “Breathe in this beautiful vista.” He quickly adds an important caveat that, after a year in fighting wildland fires, when the men look at all those vibrant trees they’ll see them only as fuel.

Supe is an intriguing character, one who gets into the metaphysical elements of firefighting: he has chats with the flames and often finds an incandescent bear running through his dreams. He is also doggedly transforming his trainees from second stringers to elite Granite Mountain Hot Shots.

His most hapless aspirant is Brendan “Donut” McDonough (Miles Teller, looking like his eyebrows are already partially singed off), a recovering addict just out of jail on a larceny charge. Other key pieces include Supe’s second-in-command Jesse (James Badge Dale, a good fit with the boys as he was in “13 Hours”) and his trainee Chris (Taylor Kitsch), a guy who’s just a little too old to be sleeping on your couch surrounded by beer bottles.

After some friction during initiation, Donut and Chris bond so well they become bosom buddies who enjoy fun evenings of babysitting for Donut’s daughter. The cast also includes Supe’s wife Amanda (a wafer-thin Jennifer Connelly), and the politically-connected fire chief Duane Steinbrink (Jeff Bridges, teasing but not doing enough country singing).

All the women in the picture must cope with the fact that the Hot Shot outpost is a highly masculine space, where every inner bicep has a tattoo of a fierce animal and beer bottles are sometimes opened with chainsaws. Unfortunately, many of the 20 firefighting characters are hard to distinguish, partially due to all the droopy mustaches they wear. With their uniform yellow fire-resistant shirts, relative anonymity and easy camaraderie, they are very much like soldiers.

But the strongest connections in the film are drawn between Amanda, Supe and Donut, who we learn are all recovering addicts. Amanda and her husband have big arguments about the big subjects, from recovery to having children to the acceptability of reckless behavior according to gender. When Supe tells the younger man, “I was you,” it’s obvious how much firefighting can change a life, though Amanda rightly asks him whether he is fighting his substance addiction with another kind of drug.

Firefighting can be a beautiful enterprise - “Only the Brave” is filled with vivid overhead shots - and heroism releases dopamine too. But, as Norman Maclean captures exactly in his book “Young Men and Fire,” you feel that the crew is, “still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.”

One day Donut is snakebit by a rattler, which turns out to be good luck. It makes him first a lookout, then an evacuee, and finally a cursed witness of the Yarnell fire, which goes from a skunker to a killer in a couple of hours. When Donut leaves the chaparral-heavy hills on a golf cart, Supe says in passing he’ll see him again on one side or the other.

Perhaps not enough screen time is devoted to the rushed decisions that led to the death of 19 men. But, then again, perhaps there is nothing more to say except that the men were doomed by the wildness of the wind, and a fire that burned so fast there was no exit.