Writer: John Gatins
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Runtime: 138 minutes
- Washington and cast excellent
- Hair raising crash sequence
- Insult to airline professionals
Flight is a movie about drug and alcohol abuse, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. It's a story about how alcohol can alienate you from your friends and family, and how it can destroy your professional life.
Or can it?
It's a tough movie to pin down thematically. It does a great job of walking the tightrope between drama and melodrama, but I'm not sure about the moral it teaches. It is a modern day Lost Weekend for the jet set, which may intrigue you, or may make you yawn, i.e., how many times do we have to be shown that drinking alcohol all day is bad for you?
The film opens with Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) lying in a hotel bed with a naked, extraordinarily beautiful woman. He smacks the usual "the movie is starting" alarm clock. As the woman gets herself ready, Whip ends up on the phone with an angry ex-wife, then proceeds to get ready for work by downing some booze and doing a line or two of cocaine.
Using alcohol and narcotics before going to work is generally not a good thing, especially if, like Whip, you are an airline pilot who has a flight in two hours. His bed mate is an airline flight attendant, but she has no problem with Whip using drugs before heading to the airport with him.
Though Whip is high on coke and booze, his aviator shades help cover the pupils, and his long-time-addict brain helps cover the substance abuse. He boards the aircraft and treats it like just another day, though today he has a new co-pilot flying with him. Also on board the aircraft is another flight attendant named Margaret. They have evidently known each other for a long time and they seem very friendly.
After a rough take off, the flight is going along smoothly. Then bang.The plane goes into a vertical dive, and the co-pilot has no control. There is yelling from a lot of people, but not from Whip. He is the picture of calmness.
In these scenes, Washington reminded me of The Right Stuff. In that book, Chuck Yeager was described as the guy who started the pilot's habit of sounding like Mr. Smooth. Even while hurtling towards the Earth in a deadly spin as a test pilot, Yeager would speak as if giving directions to the hardware store: Tail spin....Trying A....A didn't work....Trying B...B didn't work...Still spinning...Trying C...
Nothing rattled Yeager, and apparently his cool, slow drawl is the inspiration for every pilot's voice we hear today.
In Flight, while the plane is going down, Whip is Yeager incarnate. Smooth, talented and fearless. Even with all of the crap pumping through his veins, he can do no wrong.
I don't think I'm spoiling the movie by saying that Whip saves the day on that plane. He makes a miraculous landing and saves a lot of lives. The story is really about what comes after the crash landing. Whip is hailed as a hero, and every network news anchor wants to interview him, but there's a problem: after an airline accident, all crew must receive a blood test. Guess what Whip's test shows?
The remainder of the movie is a cat and mouse game between Whip and the NTSB, Whip and his friends, and Whip and himself. Every addict is a liar, and Whip is no different. Frustration will build in you as the lies grow deeper, and as Whip continues to destroy himself and others with these lies. Still, the lying feels - oddly enough - honest. It's the way that addicts behave. They will lie until they reach rock bottom.
As I said above, it's not like you haven't seen this material before. While watching the film, I rattled off a number of movies in my head that cover the drunk-person-in-crisis theme. They tend to be depressing and didactic movies that I wouldn't want to revisit. Flight is a little different in that is has a great cast, and Denzel Washington can carry any movie across the finish line.
One thing about this movie that bothers me, however, is how readily people accept his addiction, and try to cover for him when their own reputations or lives are at stake. The hot flight attendant who watches him do a line of coke, the older flight attendant who apparently knows he partied all night, the co-pilot who thinks he smells gin on Whip's breath, the lawyer and union rep who let him do some coke to calm him down before a hearing.
There's a cynical and comedic streak to the movie that is frightening. If I was in the airline profession, I would not be a fan of this film and in fact would feel the need to speak out against what it implies: that pilots can still make great landings when drunk, and that their colleagues will cover for them. Unless that's all true, which is almost too disturbing to consider.
Those thoughts aside, the movie is well done and worth seeing.
Photos: Rotten Tomatoes
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