Flight
First of all, let me just say it’s good to have Robert Zemeckis working in the realm of live-action again. While I appreciate each of his recent mo-cap films to varying degrees, I’ve missed him working with real stories, and real characters.
Secondly, this is his best film since 1997’s criminally underappreciated “Contact.” Of course, this part has less to do with Zemeckis’s direction as it does a brilliant performance by Denzel Washington, who could very well be taking home his third Oscar this year for the command and emotion he brings to the screen as “Whip” Whitaker, a pilot who, miraculously, lands a commercial plane with minimal loss of life after it malfunctions. But there are questions as to the real cause of the crash, and Whitaker’s silence after the crash only adds to the lack of certainty in the official report.
The film is about more than the aftermath of this horrific crash, however. The morning of the crash, Whip was hungover from the night before, and to wake himself up, he had a line of coke before getting in the cockpit. His co-pilot looks at him with skepticism, but as things go wrong, Whip is in absolute control, and his actions save a lot of lives. Zemeckis’s staging of the crash is remarkably intense, even better than what he did in “Cast Away” (his last live-action film), especially when Whip inverts the plane, allowing it to level out and glide out of the way of populated areas. When a toxicology test, done after the crash, comes back extraordinarily high for Whip, his union rep (Bruce Greenwood) and a union-appointed lawyer (Don Cheadle) are astonished, and also troubled by the results, which could land Whip in legal trouble if they come out.
After he gets out of the hospital, he heads out to his father’s old house; his own house is staked out by reporters. He dumps every ounce of alcohol in the sink, but when word comes of his potential legal culpability in the crash, he starts drinking again. Still, he arrogantly maintains his assertion about the crash’s mechanical cause, and is unable to accept the truth about himself as a hearing gets closer and closer. The film, then, becomes an incisive, and brutally honest, examination about alcoholism and addiction, and Washington nails every nuance and emotion with a force and feeling we haven’t seen since 1993’s “Philadelphia.” This is a tremendous performance that is equaled by Kelly Reilly as Nicole, a fellow addict whose place in the story is unexpected and surprisingly ideal for the movie it becomes.
John Gatins’s screenplay is a strong countrpoint to some of the more overtly sentimental scripts Zemeckis directed prior to his hiatus from live-action filmmaking, and the director doesn’t sugarcoat the human element in this story like he seemed to do in “Forrest Gump” and “Cast Away.” Washington follows his director to that dark place, resulting in a rare studio blockbuster that has the intensity of purpose of the best independent films. It takes a piece out of you.
