Sean Patrick Flanery, Melina Kanakaredes and a rare NYC pick-up truck in Michael Phelan's Into the Fire(Photo: Slowhand Releasing)

(Ed. note?This post contains spoilers. Kind of.)

Calling a film "interesting" is one of the most patronizing things moviegoers do, especially when they apply the term as a euphemism to avoid saying they disliked a certain film. But Michael Phelan's Into the Fire--a New York film through and through that opens in town today--really did strike me as an interesting picture, quite far from perfect but owning a redemption theme so densely layered in grief and anger that the whole thing feels like a negotiation of a fragile truce. The cliches are all there--grainy, saturated flashbacks; soaring music montages; restrained romance--but so is a series of jarring standards that falls somewhere between Freudian despair and suffocation fetish. Phelan admittedly wants you to feel better, but only after you bump along with him in the chilly dark for the better part of 90 minutes.

"Part of the journey is that we live in the day and age of instant gratification storytelling," Phelan told The Reeler last week. "It's a formula, and you know what's going to happen. You know it's going to be OK. For them to be taken on a journey, it hurts. But they do come out the other side. But those last fifteen minutes--that last reel--are a ride. And that's why the darkness needs to exist. The hope exists on top of the uncertainty."

At the same time, the pretension risk runs high, and Phelan knows it. In telling the story of Walter Hartwig (Sean Patrick Flanery), a harbor patrol lieutenant bore through with years of guilt over his sister's death, the filmmaker plunges his idea of the hero's journey into a decidedly post-9/11 malaise. Hartwig quietly relishes his role as counselor to his young partner Sandy (Pablo Schreiber) and as the resolutely cool conscience of his peers. But as a blink of sloppy, over-emotional work following a plane crash catches up with him, he winds up lost in a murky blend of self-sabotage and systemic outrage.

Hartwig builds a strained friendship with June (Jobeth Williams), whom he discovers mysteriously passed out on the sidewalk a few blocks from the Brooklyn home she shares with her granddaughter. Their relationship evolves fragments of the bond June lost when her own firefighter son died on 9/11. Meanwhile, across town, Catrina (Melina Kanakaredes) teaches music to third graders and grieves over the twin sister who perished in the same crash that cost Hartwig his job.

His contact with both women hinges on owning something of theirs, both literally and figuratively. The literal connections involve invoking not just a few deuses ex machina, but nothing so willfully contrived that it compromises Into the Fire from the starting blocks. However, the figurative connections--the immense pressures of sudden loss and mourning--introduce a sort of politics that provide the film's genuinely interesting momentum. Flanery, whose rugged action-hero looks fuel a much more ironic vulnerability than you would presume, is not content simply moping through the motions as Phelan's wounded protagonist; in assuming habits such as an annual birthday swim from the middle of the harbor to Coney Island, he channels a brooding, full-blown self-destruction that can never find a balance with June's and Catrina's own abject despair.

"One person isn't right or wrong--we're all different," Phelan said. "This goes for all qualities including grief and darkness. They're all different, but they're bound together by one thing: They're all connected with tragedy." I mean, of course it sounds like he is stating the obvious, but at its best, Into the Fire is anything but obvious. Christopher Norr's camera dances with night, floating the city in a handsome darkness that flirts outright with underexposure. Phelan and editor Shawna Callahan introduce Hartwig and Catrina early on in a brittle sequence that you cannot be certain took place outside his head until the film's final act, and cut the rest of the film in an equally angular manner that emphasizes Hartwig's disorientation and disillusion. "If you do an independent film," Phelan explained, "it's almost our duty to try different things, because no one's telling us, 'You can't do that,' or, 'You've gotta try this because we're going to sell this in Kansas City and they won't know what they're looking at.' The only way we can do it in 19 days is that we will have to move, and we will have to compromise on coverage. Once you make that commitment, it's going to lend to the reality of being with these people. So we had to try--and I'm not saying we completely succeeded--to create the environment that it was an honor to watch the journeys of our three heros rather than watch kind of a staged, glossy show."

Into the Fire indeed anchors its style in a story with the potential to go places, and the viewer has no reason to feel tricked at Phelan's relatively happy ending as much as they might feel disappointed. You have to see it coming when he introduces things like butterfly metaphors and a crushingly overwrought score (some sequences seem to function as little more than humid music videos) that belies the space Flanery and Williams in particular invest in their characters. The depth they achieve while quietly stealing from one another's conditions--Hartwig as the lost son, June as the dignified mourner--represents the impact Into the Fire could have wielded had Phelan just stood by and trusted those darker aesthetic instincts. Their execution is clearly no accident?at least they do not seem as accidental as the hero's ambiguous redemption at the film's close.

In fairness, Phelan described his film's genesis as something rooted in promise, "a hit of something" that could be uplifting after guiding viewers along such a severe downward trajectory. I indeed think Into the Fire retains that promise, but what is more cheering is knowing that Phelan could get this film made in the year 2005 and that he may make another that capitalizes on an edge that is less dependent on playing catch-up after 70 or so minutes with the Hollywood paradigm of the hero's journey. Despite their periodic forays into melodrama, his characters are very human and can be--dare I say it--plenty interesting, and I can only say I have an equally sincere interest in seeing what Phelan does next.