Flight

Robert Zemeckis must have a thing for plane crashes.  Twelve years ago he made Cast Away, which featured one of the most harrowing plane crash scenes ever, when Tom Hanks went down with a Fed-Ex plane and ended up on a deserted island.  Now, with his very next live-action film, after attempting to perfect the art of motion-capture animation with The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol, it’s yet another plane crash that is the catalyst for yet another character study, this time with Denzel Washington in the pilot seat.  But unlike Cast Away, where for most of the film Tom Hanks was alone with the elements, allowing out of necessity for Zemeckis to use the camera to tell the story, with Flight it’s all dialogue, all the time, which unfortunately draws attention to itself in all the wrong ways, and leaves what should have been a great performance by Washington, twisting in the wind just like the plane.

Washington plays Whip Whitaker, a pilot for a major airline, who spends his evenings and mornings before takeoff snorting cocaine, binge drinking, and bedding flight attendants, as detailed in a protracted opening scene in a motel room, where it is also revealed through a phone conversation that he has an ex-wife and an estranged son who want nothing to do with him.  He arrives at the airport, stoned and high, masqueraded as a joie de vivre meant to suggest he has done this many times.  He downs two minis of vodka and proceeds to fly, first through extremely thick storm clouds and heavy turbulence, and then through malfunctioning engines, which ultimately bring the plane down, but not before Whitaker can pull some fancy trick like turning the plane upside down so it can coast its way down rather than in full nosedive.  At first he’s a national hero, his face plastered all over the news, himself becoming a recluse, shunning the spotlight, perhaps out of modesty, or perhaps because of something more sinister eating away at him, that has set him on a path of self-destruction.    Naturally, while in the hospital they check, routinely of course, his blood alcohol level and uncover the alarming truth about his state of mind when the plane went down, foreshadowing the usual collision in films like this between the story and some future trial or deposition where he will be forced to testify under oath.

Enter the supporting characters, Charlie Anderson, a close friend and representative from the airline pilots union, played by Bruce Greenwood, and Hugh Lang, a lawyer, played by Don Cheadle, who emerge as the bearers of bad news for Whitaker, and then periodically appear to both propel the film toward its ending, reminding us that we’re getting closer, and as excuses to stage self-destructive confrontations about Whitaker’s drinking problem.  The increasingly furrowed brow on Bruce Greenwood’s head is far more accurate at telling time than looking down at your watch.  Also enter Nicole, played by Kelly Reilly, a junkie who is introduced to us in the beginning, her trajectory to the hospital, from an overdose, paralleled with Whitaker’s.  The two of them meet in a staircase in the hospital, both craving a cigarette.  They talk about God, and chance, with a terminal cancer patient who believes that God chose him to be sick, and that is the reason he can be so full of life right up to the very end.  The scene is long, so long that it becomes too obvious in its attempt to add a spiritual level to the film, echoed later as the crash is deemed an “act of God.”  Narratively the entire purpose of this scene is for Nicole and Whip to meet each other, and for him to promise to come see her again, which he does, and the two of them shack up on his family’s abandoned farm.  I suppose the filmmakers thought the scene needed to be a specific length, in order for it to be believable that he would seek her out.   I would have bought it for less; far better films have hung on less.  In between meetings with Lang and Anderson, Whitaker battles with his addiction to alcohol, and we are treated to many scenes of alcoholism, or rather, how we all believe an alcoholic is supposed to act, even before it really becomes clear that this film is about nothing more than the disease.  Its vacant attempts to be about anything else fall flat, and the film’s second act becomes a string of clichés glued together with Washington’s drunken stupors and in-your-face intensity, spinning its wheels until the third act which everyone knows is coming.  It’s in this hang-time, the dreaded second act, where Flight must truly earn its ending, and like so many other films, it’s here where it mostly falls apart.

Once I pegged this as nothing more than a glorified disease-of-the-week film, dressed up in its Oscar best with an A-list actor, director, and padded screenplay, the lack of depth became painfully apparent.  There isn’t anything about Whitaker’s alcoholism that we haven’t seen before.  Scenes of him passed out in an easy-chair, scenes of him stumbling into a table full of empty bottles, scenes of him pouring out all the liquor in the house and then going to the store to buy more, check.  I found myself thinking of Leaving Las Vegas, and how Nicholas Cage’s character was the story instead of just part of it, how when he says to Elizabeth Shue to never ask him to stop drinking it takes the weight of expectations off the how and the why of his decline, and allows the audience to just focus on the moment, even leaving room for laughter, something that Flight tries to force down our throats in a scene immediately before the deposition, with John Goodman as a hippy drug supplier, which is the most emotionally misguided and categorically incorrect scene in the film.  In Leaving Las Vegas, Shue was the surrogate to bring the audience into Cage’s world.  In Flight there is no such character.  There is a battle waging inside Whitaker, no doubt the screenplay wants us to believe, but the film never asks anything more of us than to take it at face value.  Nicole cleans and sobers up off screen, enough that she too can look upon Whitaker as a lost cause and a situation that is no longer healthy for her, but glossing over her recovery only serves to amplify Whitaker’s lack of definition.  And Lang and Anderson are so completely interchangeable, and of one mind throughout the film that their appearances practically strip the scenes of any drama.  And screenwriter John Gatins’s (Real Steel, Coach Carter) strange decision to leave Whitaker’s ex-wife and son out of the film completely, save for one scene of non-stop screaming, that is overwrought to the point of incredulity, is puzzling in a two-and-a-half hour film that favors extended scenes in stairwells pontificating about God.  It’s too easy for his family to say they hate him.  It basically telegraphs the end of the film as a matter of scriptural necessity, without adding up to anything organic.

I wanted to love Flight.  There are some directors whose presence alone suggests a certain level of quality.  But the memory of Back To The Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and Cast Away tends to overpower the rest of Zemeckis’s oeuvre, which admittedly is not very good.  Flight is nothing more than a dressed up turkey for holiday audiences who don’t want anything too challenging, who want to walk away from the film saying “oh alcoholism, how terrible,” before relegating the film to some dark recess of their mind, never to be thought of again until a few months later when in a video store they can say “Flight?  Did we see that?”  The film has the bark of infinitely better films like Leaving Las Vegas, but doesn't have any bite.  In the end Whip Whitaker is nothing more than a cipher, never allowed to truly connect with the audience, because quite simply, there is nothing driving him to drink except the machinations of plot; he has no Rosebud.  Washington is usually great, but here he is nothing more than an extension of bad writing, a scenery chewer.  It’s as if he watched a bunch of alcoholism films and thought he could do that, rolling his tongue against the inside of his cheek whenever the character gets really serious.  Perhaps it would be lazy of me to say, overall, Flight just never takes off.  But, as Forrest Gump might say, lazy is as lazy does; and it warrants a response in kind.

 ** out of *****