By now you more than likely have seen the movie’s trailer, so you know that Flight is the movie in which Denzel Washington’s pilot character saves the day by flying the plane he’s commanding upside down.
It is also the first live-action feature that director Robert Zemeckis has helmed since 2000’s Cast Away, and yet another showcase of Washington’s considerable, Oscar-winning talent.
More pressingly, though (for me), this is also the movie that made me feel rather aggroyed by the guy as an actor, for he is just too gosh darn good – his Whip Whitaker is a raging, unapologetic alcoholic. Washington is tremendous in the part.
Now, mind you, I have nothing against anyone struggling with substance abuse. It happens, it sucks, and, y’ know, here to help. The screenplay, however, is ungiving. It like, doesn’t want us to feel any pity for Whip, a man who likes to party harder than he works (and we know that being a pilot ain’t easy...). Which is, I suppose, a true-to-life honesty: feeling sorry for people never helps anyone at all.
To say that the character is designed to test anyone’s patience is an understatement.
If I remember correctly at one point one of his colleagues, a flight attendant, says that she’s “known” the guy for more than a decade.
The inference being she’s turned a blind eye to his boozing and drugging for that long.
As played by Tamara Tunie (TV’s Law & Order: SVU), that flight attendant is an interesting character, and I wish the dynamic between her and Whip had been explored just a tad further.
Alas, spilled milk and missed celluloid.
Whip’s a career man of the sky, but he is also quite the seasoned addict.
He knows how to perk himself up when he’s coming down...when he’s crashing, which is a skill that comes in handy in the first third of the movie, when it is at its thriller best.
Ah, yes. Flight is a good, edge-of-your-seater, but it’s also a heavy drama about addiction and the consequences – or lack of – of addiction. And that’s a bit of a problem because that’s not what I went into the theater expecting it to be, and it won’t be what you're going in there expecting it to be, trust. Once Capt. Whitaker saves the lot of his charges in an amazing feat of derring-do, you’ll be awed...and then you’ll wonder, “What now?”
Will the movie take us through the media blitz that such a heroic act would bring about for a pilot? Nah, that’s not visceral in the least.
Since the movie lets us in on Whip’s dirty little secret from the get go thanks to an expertly telegraphed opening scene (completely with nudity!), it takes us down the path of the investigation into what caused the plane to malfunction so spectacularly and crash on a field outside Atlanta.
While all eyes outside are on Whip the hero, all eyes on the inside are on Whip the drunk. He knows, just as we do, that he’s a drunk. But he also knows that no one else in the world could have landed his plane the way he did. He’s shaken, alright, but his initial...guilt soon begins to fade. Immediately after the incident, he tries to clean up, but as the investigation draws closer and closer to home, his habits prove they’ll die hard. So when Don Cheadle’s big-time Chicago lawyer is brought in to help the guy, he’s gone...done trying to fight his demons and partying with them instead in one bender after another.
While all eyes outside are on Whip the hero, all eyes on the inside are on Whip the drunk. He knows, just as we do, that he’s a drunk. But he also knows that no one else in the world could have landed his plane the way he did. He’s shaken, alright, but his initial...guilt soon begins to fade. Immediately after the incident, he tries to clean up, but as the investigation draws closer and closer to home, his habits prove they’ll die hard. So when Don Cheadle’s big-time Chicago lawyer is brought in to help the guy, he’s gone...done trying to fight his demons and partying with them instead in one bender after another.
It is at this juncture that Flight introduces a subplot about Nicole (Kelly Reilly, an English redhead who looks like Lucy Punch without the zest in her eyes), a junkie who was ODing as Whip was gliding his plane down to somewhat-safe crash-land it not that far from her wrong-side-of-the-tracks abode.
The two meet at the hospital, strike up a connection...end up hooking up later on. They're kindred. Except she wants to stay sober, and he wants the world to know that the incident was no fault of his.
To that end, he’ll do the bare minimum, if that, of what is asked of him in order to help him. He ultimately finds his salvation in the most unlikely of fashions, which surprises him and, thanks to Washington’s phenomenal nuance, this redeems the guy and the movie just in time for us not to wish we had missed it altogether.
My Rating **1/2
Photo: Paramount Pictures.
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