![]() The actress, however, makes a three-course meal out of the role, and her duets with Brolin run the gamut from tender to confrontational, sexy to steely. Her lonely Amanda is a better written version of a typical long-suffering-spouse, in that she gets an inner life (she cares for horses) and her own solo turns. The surprise MVP runner-up here is Connelly, despite her tendency to get kind of yell-y during key dramatic moments. The perpetually underrated James Badge Dale is Marsh’s soot-covered second-in-command. Jeff Bridges, less bearded but just as craggy as usual, is the mover and shaker who’s helping the crew go from unofficial “deucers” (firefighters who can’t engage directly with these natural-disaster infernos) to certified frontliners. Miles Teller plays a first-class A-1 fuck-up in need of redemption – a Teller speciality – who goes from Marsh’s pet project to valuable team member. It makes all the difference.Īnd while the man with his name above the title injects the lion’s share of vulnerability and humanity into this three-alarm testosterone fest, the ensemble cast knows exactly when they need to step up and what notes they need to hit. He lives for getting to do that second part. But he can sell that sort of pulpy dialogue and still telegraph the deep currents running below what Marsh’s wife, Amanda (Jennifer Connelly) calls “that John Wayne thing.” Any he-man star can show off by breaking an office chair into kindling out of sputtering rage not everyone can show you that man afterwards when he’s broken, spent and stewing in his own guilt and shame. His Marsh may be the sort of alpha-male role that requires actors to say lines like “once you get a real hard taste of the bitch at work, you won’t see beauty … you’ll just see fuel” and still keep a straight face. ![]() But he seems especially suited for rugged, blue-collar guys with thousand-yard stares Brolin’s got a lived-in look that suggests a familiarity with hard work and hangovers. The 49-year-old actor has played everything from cops to killers, death-obsessed supervillains to dimwitted Presidents. ![]() He’s a screen archetype, the kind of movie character that would’ve been played by Clark Gable in the 1930s, Burt Lancaster in the 1950s, Steve McQueen in the 1970s and Kurt Russell in the 1990s.īecause it’s 2017, Only the Brave – a love letter to Marsh and his dangerous vocation, largely based on a 2013 GQ feature – puts Josh Brolin in the literal hot seat, and the movie is all the luckier for it. The man talks to wildfires the way that serial-killer profilers talk to crime scenes.) Forget for a second that Marsh was a real-life “hotshot” who led a crew into battle against these blazes. (“What are you up to?” he’ll wonder aloud as he watches flames shift their path. The kind of dudes who treat their enemies – in this case, the massive forest fires that annually scorch acres of Arizona landscape – with something close to respect. Their flaws and temper-flares are balanced out by their virtues: staunch professionalism, a salt-of-the-earth nobility, an almost stubborn loyalty to their men. They’re hard-ass guys, often stoic but capable of being sensitive and, in rare cases, prone to sentimentality. It’s just the way it was.If you’ve been to the movies any time over the last century, you’re familiar with men like Eric Marsh. You can’t win them all, but if you don’t try then you never know. ![]() “I would prefer to get caught with 10km to go. “Devastating, it’s not nice to lose in that way,” he said. ![]() I feel really sorry for those guys.”Ĭlarke cut a disconsolate figure afterwards. They had a lead of two minutes and we had to use all the guys available, it wasn’t easy. It was pretty close, it was not easy to catch them for a long time. “It’s nice to have a victory now, it was a tough day for the team and it’s nice to pay them back with a victory. “I’m pretty happy, it’s what we came for,” said Pedersen. After going down in the bunch sprint on Wednesday’s fifth stage, Cavendish (Astana-Qazaqstan) crashed again and crossed the line a long way adrift. Pedersen held off Jonathan Milan, Pascal Ackermann, Kaden Groves and Fernando Gaviria to take victory. Photograph: Luca Bettini/AFP/Getty Images ![]()
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