Stereotypes
abound in this melodrama about Chicago firefighters. As much as any number of
Ron Howard titles - Far and Away, The Paper, The Da Vinci Code
- Backdraft is emblematic of everything that’s safe, bland,
contrived and underwhelming about the director. Content to be the premiere hack
of Hollywood tripe, he is devoid of passion, style, or even noticeable,
recurring themes. Sit through a dozen of his films and you will know nothing
about the man or his interests, and you’ll have no awareness of his feelings
for cinema or what he is aiming to do as a filmmaker. There are no vestiges of a
once-shy boy who dreamed of making movies, as one can sense so strongly in the
films of Scorsese, Spielberg, P.T. Anderson and Tarantino. An ensemble
drama focused on a specific industry, Backdraft is the kind of film that
might have been turned into something compelling in the hands of Robert Altman or
John Sayles. Instead, everything from its screenplay to its soundtrack is
handled about as predictably and unoriginally as one can imagine. Some
exceptional actors are dropped in to make the best of the situation, (such as
Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Scott Glenn), but in
the end they’re only mortal and not necromancers. Only De Niro manages to
elevate his scenes with some memorable zeal, and it’s painfully clear he does
so in spite of his director, not because of him. Most everyone else is just
ejaculating clichés faithfully from the script. A decent director like Jonathan Demme or Andrew Davis would
have immediately dumped the boring A-story about quarreling firefighter brothers Kurt Russell and William Baldwin in favor of De Niro’s character and
his crusade to stop a prolific arsonist terrorizing the city. But nope, Howard is
all in. The brothers fight, they have romantic problems, they agonize about
their careers, they utter their dialogue with comical earnestness. It’s fully
appropriate that Backdraft made no impact, inspired no young filmmakers,
and is largely forgotten.
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