FLIGHT

Flight, the new film from writer John Gatins and director Robert Zemeckis, has an incredible set piece near the beginning of the movie in which a pilot (Denzel Washington) is forced to crash land a plane in nightmare conditions by making it roll 360 degrees (flying upside down for awhile) and coming down on a field near a church about ready to do some Sunday go to meeting baptisms.  It’s an amazing technical feat (and not just the landing, but the filming as well) and it’s an exhilarating start.  When this section is over, the movie sets up an equally incredible enigma: Whip, the pilot, was drunk and had cocaine in his system when he performed this unbelievable stunt; but that wasn’t the cause of the crash.  And Whip’s handling of the landing was something that ten other pilots couldn’t have done sober.  So the whole movie seems more than ready to tackle issues and questions brought up by this fascinating conundrum.

And then the movie becomes…something else, something else entirely, and something that has nothing to do with either the crash landing or what sort of punishment should be given to a pilot who is able to make a miraculous landing (Gatins’ words, not mine) while drunk.   It actually becomes a rather routine, formulaic The Lost Weekend, The Days of Wine and Roses, When a Man Loves a Woman, Clean and Sober (fill in with your favorite film in the genre) story about an alcoholic.

Six people died in the crash and a huge number of people were seriously injured.  But is this their story or is the story about the crash and what it means?  No.  Believe it or not, all of this is chopped liver.  All of this is a macguffin, because the only reason for any of this, the only purpose for all these deaths, the only purpose of the crash, the only reason for all this destruction is so that Whip will start going to AA.

I’m not kidding.  I am totally serious.  And to back up this idea, there’s a ton of talk about God in the movie and whether everything is preordained or has a purpose, whether everything that happens is just part of an overall plan.  To be fair, all this mention of God at times tends to be a bit metaphorical in that whenever the big guy’s name is mentioned, He’s a stand in for all the unforeseen and uncontrollable things that happen in life, as when destruction from a hurricane is an “act of God”.   But still.

And it’s not that the movie is without its positive aspects.   But oddly enough, it’s not when the film focuses on Whip’s journey, but when it focuses on the issues related to the crash that the movie really comes to life.  Both Don Cheadle, as a long suffering lawyer, and Peter Gerety, as the owner of the airline, stand out as the few who really seem to understand what is really going on and that the meaning of the crash is the crash and that Whip’s journey is actually a hindrance and just getting in the way of the real issues.  When Gerety tells everybody off, I thought, finally, someone who really gets what it’s all about. 

Washington is fine as Whip, but he’s always a lot more fun when he’s playing anti-heroes like here, people you would not want to meet in a darkened alleyway.  Melissa Leo also makes her mark at the end because, like Cheadle and Gerety, she’s in a different movie.  The low point, though, has to be John Goodman as Whip’s connection.  Goodman is one of our finest character actors, but here, as in Argo and some other recent films, he’s been reduced to playing, well, John Goodman roles, and he deserves better.

In all fairness, I should point out that many in the audience around me were deeply moved.  But I just couldn’t join in.   For me, if truth be told, I was bit offended.  Here I thought that Leibnitz and the philosophy of “the best of all possible worlds” ended with Voltaire’s ruthless satire Candide.   But apparently not.  No matter how awful things are, no matter how many people die, no matter how much destruction there is, it’s okay, because there’s always a silver lining.   People can die, but their death has meaning because it helped someone enter a recovery program.  Really.