FLIGHT

FLIGHT

Reviewed by Paul Gibbs

GRADE: B+

I was extremely excited about the pairing of Denzel Washington and director Robert Zemeckis. So much so that it probably gave me the wrong expectations for Flight.  I was hoping for a film that moved me and inspired me in the way that Forrest Gump and Cast Away did, and I wanted to love Washington’s character the way I loved the characters played by Tom Hanks in those films. Flight is not that kind of movie at all. There’s a lot to admire here, but it has to be approached without any expectation of the kind of crowd pleasing movie most fans expect from Zemeckis.

            Washington plays “Whip” Whittaker, a divorced airline pilot. As we first meet him, he’s in bed with a flight attendant, and doing cocaine to help him get over the effects of the copious amounts of alcohol he’s been  drinking  so he can be up for the flight he’s piloting that morning. As you can probably guess, no airlines cooperated in the making of this film.  When Whittaker’s plane experiences catastrophic equipment failure, Whittaker brilliantly and heroically manages a crash landing that saves the vast majority of the more than 200 people on board.  He’s immediately and rightly hailed for saving the day. But, regardless of the fact that it was equipment trouble that caused the crash, and that Whittaker’s feat of flying was amazing, the toxin reports still show that he had enough alcohol in his blood stream to qualify him as a private club in the state of Utah.  The bulk of the film is spent with Whittaker’s legal team working to get him out of this mess, while Whittaker wrestles with his demons and begins a relationship with a fellow alcoholic/addict (Kelly Reilly, Mrs. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes films).

            Denzel Washington is truly great actor, and his work here is a compelling and disturbing portrait of a brilliant man who has thrown his life away on booze and drugs. I tend to struggle with Washington in unsympathetic roles, because I inherently want to like him. It’s  more or less impossible to like Whip Whittaker  He’s a selfish, self-destructive fool. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a very impressive performance, but it makes for a film that’s not terribly enjoyable to watch. Washington is surrounded  by a strong supporting cast. Reilly does good work, as do Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, and the always reliable John Goodman. But the film is hands down stolen from all of them in a one scene cameo by James Badge Dale (probably most remembered as Jack Bauer's partner in Season 3 of 24) as an eccentric and smart-alecky cancer patient in the hospital where Whittaker goes after the crash.

No other director wows me more with his mastery of the camera and the various technical and visual elements of film than Zemeckis. He is the master of the “money shot”, but in a way that never takes me away from the story or characters. His direction of the crash is as impressive as the one he gave us in Cast Away, and throughout I found myself impressed by the work he and cinematographer Don Burgess were doing, and the skill with which editor Jeremiah O’Driscoll was cutting it together. And I feel that Zemeckis is seriously underrated as a director of actors (not just Tom Hanks), and this marks some of the most subtle characterization he’s given us. But, ultimately, for me, it didn't rank with Zemeckis' best films. A lot of this is because it’s simply grueling to watch 2 hours and 20 minutes of Whittaker descending into worse and worse self-destructive behavior. And it often feels like Zemeckis may be too preoccupied with showing us that he’s not limited to uplifting feel-good films by piling on the harsh R-rated content. I feel that Flight offers a truthful and often compelling portrait of addiction, but in the end  I’m not really sure how much that was needed in a world where movies like Leaving Las Vegas and Affliction already exist. Perhaps the value is that this is a big budget, mainstream film with a major star and a dazzling action/effects sequence, and may be seen more than those were. I know the film has me reluctant to even walk past a cooler of beer in a store.

Flight adds to my considerable respect for the outstanding talents of Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis.  If you can handle the harshness of the content and the bleakness of the story, there’s much to admire for students of acting and filmmaking. General audiences aren't likely to find a lot to enjoy. As a Zemeckis completeist, this will end up on my shelf eventually, but it’s not going to get anything like the kind of play that Back to the Future or Forrest Gump do.

Flight is rated R for profanity, violence, sex, nudity, alcohol and drug use.