A Performance That Takes 'Flight'

by Brett Parker

In an era where cinephiles grumble about how Hollywood is only investing in CGI-ridden blockbusters, pointless reboots, and Superhero flicks, Flight is some kind of refreshing triumph.  Here is a major Hollywood production with a big marquee star helmed by a veteran hitmaker that is essentially a quiet character study.  Despite an epic disaster sequence in the first act, most of the film is devoted to dialogue and quiet moments that circle around an alcoholic’s internal struggle with his demons.  Although movies like this tend to pop up all the time, it’s usually more so through the independent world and rarely in the weekend multiplex battles.  Although this is a hyperbolic assumption, it feels like its been since the 90s since a studio assembled its big-boy Hollywood tools for even a disposable release based solely on subtle drama and a nuanced central performance.

The film focuses on Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a veteran commercial pilot for SouthJet Airlines.  When we first meet Whip, he is waking up in a hotel room surrounded by empty booze bottles and a naked flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) smoking a joint.  After dealing with an argumentative phone call from his ex-wife (Garcelle Beauvais), he does some lines of cocaine and is heading out the door towards his next flight.  But as he tries to nurse a hangover while flying an airliner flight out of Florida, the plane spins into a chaotic nose dive, making a deadly crash seem imminent.  Thanks to Whip’s risky instincts and experience, he is able to roll the plane upside down and crash the plane into an open field rather safely, saving a majority of the passenger’s lives.  

As Whip is pulled from the wreckage and hospitalized, the media hails him as a hero for saving the lives of all but 6 of the passengers, for the crash would’ve surely killed everyone on board if it weren’t for his quick-thinking skills.  However, big problems loom after the crash once its revealed that Whip’s blood tests in the hospital show he was intoxicated on alcohol and cocaine while he was in the cockpit.  An airline union leader (Bruce Greenwood) and an attorney (Don Cheadle) inform him that if they all don’t mine their way around this investigation carefully, he could go to jail for a very long time.  Whip tries to keep a low profile by avoiding the press and keeping all information about the crash on a carefully-plotted need-to-know basis, but the stress of the investigation causes his alcoholism to kick into high gear, and it becomes apparent to everyone that he has a serious problem that needs treatment.  Can Whip keep things together enough to avoid jail time?  Is there no turning back from his dark decent into alcoholism?  

Robert Zemeckis probably isn’t exactly the first filmmaker you’d nominate to helm an intimate portrait of addiction until you catch on that the script fits in perfectly with his usual taste for putting a human face on the unpredictability of the universe.  Of course the film’s opening depiction of a plane crash--undoubtedly one of the best and scariest plane crash scenes ever put on film--is right up Zemeckis’ FX-expert alley, reminiscent of the familiar skill he showed with Cast Away’s pivotal plane crash, yet Whip’s emotional torment in the face of catastrophe recalls similar struggles Zemeckis’s protagonists have faced in the past.  Whip’s ordeal greatly reminded me of the way medieval chaos forced Beowulf to confront his grandoise ego (Beowulf) or how injustice in a freakish cartoon world caused Detective Eddie Valiant to deal with his prejudices and haunted past (Who Framed Roger Rabbit).  Plus, the way Whip gradually is forced to reconcile the mess disaster has wrought in spite of himself reminded me of the ways Marty McFly and Chuck Noland had to work through their indifferences and hangups to try and make an out-of-whack world make sense to them again.  While most filmmakers rely on pulp plotting to guide their way through earthbound cosmic fantasies, Zemeckis has always favored humanist drama to pull great moralistic values from hectic movie-world concoctions.

Although Flight is a considerably exceptional depiction of addiction, some parts of the film can’t help but have some Hollywood corniness.  With some scenes that depict the harrowing side of drugs and alcoholism, you have a hard time telling whether it’s truthful or Hollywood puffing things up.  The very worst thing about the film is the soundtrack selection, which selects the most obvious of pop songs to hammer home emotional cue points in the plot with the upmost clumsiness.  While using Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright”  to express Whip high on cocaine isn’t too bad, using The Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil” for the entrance of Whip’s drug dealer and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” to show Whip dumping out alcohol really made me cringe.  Rule of Thumb for Future Filmmakers: if you’re making a movie about Alcoholism, opening the film with a song called “Alcohol” is the opposite of elegant.

In spite of the film’s small flaws, it’s Washington’s superb performance that sustains your interest all the way to the bittersweet end.  Washington is a treasured movie star who has earned our sympathy through an image of great command, confidence, and spontaneity.  The electricity and wallop here comes from the way Washington uses those gifts to try and bury a desperate vulnerability below the surface of a troubled character.  Washington shows great precision in his depiction of an alcoholic by relying on quiet reactions and careful physical unease as Whip wrestles with the bottle.  The best scenes in the film are when Whip tries to rely on his arrogance and assured demeanor to put a mask on the alarming struggle so obviously eating away at him.  Everything comes to a head in a final scene in which Washington allows a poignant release for Whip that hits the audience like a gut-punch and Washington’s expert lyricism makes us feel like its the perfect outcome for the character.

In spite of some of its fluffier parts, we feel for the most part that Flight is an admirable depiction of its central character’s demons.  Credit for this is due to the way screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel, Hard Ball) sees Whip’s journey to a logical, cathartic end instead of easily tidying things up for a labored happy ending.  Some will probably condemn Zemeckis for the way he makes a man’s struggle with addiction entertaining-- a freakish contradiction the more you ponder it--but I admire the way Zemeckis harkens back to the ancient Hollywood tradition of centralizing big moral themes on a large Hollywood canvas.  While an indie version of this same concept would probably hold more true grit, I admired the way this Hollywood vehicle isn’t afraid to discover its own damaged soul.