How can firefighters proving their mettle be so laughable?

In Ladder 49, fires smolder and rage and generally act in a far more lively and persuasive fashion than any of the men struggling to put them out. A sob story about a Baltimore fireman, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Jack Morrison, a once and future hero who battles untold infernos, saves untold lives and quaffs untold draft beers to become a fireman's fireman, the kind who fearlessly enters burning buildings and puts everything at risk, including a picture-perfect family and a self so radically unexamined, so thin and vaporous, it's a wonder it doesn't drift off the screen along with all the billows of enveloping smoke.

Shortly after the film opens, Jack rescues a worker from inside a warehouse engulfed in flames. Subsequently trapped inside, the disoriented firefighter takes stock of everything he might lose, prompting a series of chronological flashbacks that are heavy on bathos and nearly absent of any psychological insight.

Pegged as a true-to-life story, one meant to put a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye, this is essentially a male weepie about strong, simple men and the strong, simple women behind them, and as such, it's platitudinous rubbish. What makes this nonsense more galling than usual is that while Ladder 49 might have started out as a heartfelt attempt to honor those in the line of literal fire, it weighs in as an attempt to exploit their post-9/11 symbolism.

The director, Jay Russell, has a couple of children's movies under his belt (Tuck Everlasting, My Dog Skip) and perhaps because he's used to pitching his wares at tots or studio executives, or perhaps because Lewis Colick's screenplay gave him no choice, Ladder 49, which opens nationwide today, bears no relationship to life as it's lived by ordinary real adults.

The flashbacks, which begin with Jack's firehouse apprenticeship, unfold like a series of gauzy advertisements so phony, so glossed up, you half expect the characters to hawk a little of that beer they keep downing. It soon becomes clear, however, that what's being sold here isn't brew, but a deracinated fantasy of heroism, one in which firehouse camaraderie and spectacular, prime-time-ready rescues invariably trump the ordinary courage of family life, especially on working-class salaries.

Given this emphasis on action over introspection, special effects over everyday affect, it's no surprise that by the time the story loops back to the present with Jack groaning under debris and running out of oxygen, you know as little about this guy as you did at the beginning.

Phoenix is a pleasant screen presence and, on occasion, an inspired actor, but he doesn't have the chops to surmount the cliche of his character. And so, advancing along the stages of man with the inevitability of a playground ditty, Jack finds the girl (Jacinda Barrett, adrift in a thankless part), and after the love, the marriage and a baby in a baby carriage, gives himself over to the job like a warrior monk. He lets loose the laughter and holds back the fear, becoming a memorial to a phony ideal instead of a flesh-and-blood man.