*½/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen, Sean Bean
screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
directed by Robert Schwentke
by Walter Chaw The bad guys have a plan and to pull it off they need only total omniscience and omnipotence, putting Robert Schwentke's Flightplan in the company of hysterical caper flicks like Arlington Road–though it's also the kind of hysterical estrogen melodrama à la Mildred Pierce in which Jodie Foster specializes these days. Between this and Panic Room, it almost seems as if Foster is taking tough maternal roles to protect the over-exposed, maybe-exploited child actress she used to be, to the point where the quality of the project itself comes second.
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Kyle (Foster) is an airplane engineer flying her husband's body from Germany to Long Island on an airplane she's helped design. Along for the ride is six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston), instructed to act like a giant doll both on- and off-camera–fuel for the fire in reading Flightplan as a commentary on Foster's own childhood of various Coppertone poses. Once airborne, Kyle falls asleep, waking somewhere over the Atlantic to discover that Julia has disappeared and that no one–not the sympathetic but frustrated captain (Sean Bean), the sleepy-eyed air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard), the bitchy flight attendant (Kate Beahan), or the vacuous, moon-faced flight attendant (Erika Christensen)–seems to recall ever having seen the little girl. The rest of the film is Kyle asserting her formidable will in imprisoning fellow passengers to their seats, turning public opinion against a pair of Arabs in a subplot that's never satisfactorily resolved, and generally acting icy and intelligent in that inimitable Jodie Foster fashion.
The solution is so twisty and specious that it makes absolutely no sense and requires, besides, that Kyle possess a detailed knowledge of explosives and, ultimately, that she demonstrate a puzzling lack of concern for the child for whom she's spent the whole film chewing scenery. Marooned in Flightplan, then, is a premise that pings off the things in our innate nature that are most sacred and animal: the instinct to protect your child; the fear of being falsely-accused; the fear of being plotted against; the fear of being perceived as insane; and the fear of actually being insane. Its best moments are therefore those where Kyle's fear is at fever pitch–when a cabin-ful of people look at her in mute judgment (or join in ironic, hostile applause), for instance, or when she's convinced by positions of authority that her child was, in fact, a phantasm created by grief. (The Forgotten is this film's land-bound doppelgänger.) Flightplan falls apart the rest of the time by creating in Kyle an avatar of order who builds bridges between Arabs and bigots, proles and the bourgeoisie, and the perception of stability and the reality of chaos. It's too much for her narrow shoulders, as it would be for ours.
The picture skates on the surface of our collective societal discomforts like Wes Craven's Red Eye and, in a broader sense, ABC's "Lost", do, finding in airplanes the equivalent of WWII lifeboats and their microcosmic metaphors for island nations under siege, the ways the citizen/archetypes housed therein deal with displacement and invasion. If it succeeds at anything, it succeeds in presenting a situation that is almost universally compelling to us as a nation at this moment in our history. Flightplan identifies a setting we mistrust, peopled with peers and superiors we mistrust, and a smart, driven, and, especially, dogged (listen to the throng afterwards and the repeated marvel of "She never gave up!") protagonist who will persevere where our self-appointed protectors will not, will gather and assimilate information when our intelligence bureaus fail to do so, and will of course leave none of our children behind as cannon fodder. It's not a good movie despite its stylishness and performances, but it does have a short window of appeal for reasons entirely independent of its plausibility. We want this fantasy in 2005–I doubt anybody'd bother to release it in any other time. Originally published: September 23, 2005.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Why does Jodie Foster's character have such a masculine name in Flightplan? This is probably a remnant of the screenplay's earliest drafts, which were written with a male lead in mind. Once Foster expressed interest in the project out went original writer Peter A. Dowling and in came script doctor du jour Billy Ray, we learn in the surprisingly comprehensive, if dedicatedly uncontroversial, "The In-Flight Movie: The Making of Flightplan", a 5-part, 39-minute documentary supplementing the film on DVD. (A splendid armchair anthroplogist, Foster herself suggests that "men don't question their sanity as much as women do.") The cutesy structure–each sub-section is named after an aspect of air travel, e.g. "Security Checkpoint Area: Story of a Thriller"–facilitates interviews with everyone from Dowling to composer James Horner, but even at that, there's miraculously little crossover between the information they impart and director Robert Schwentke's feature-length commentary. Still, the piece is not without its peccadilloes, including an inexplicable motif in which raw dailies are compared to the digital intermediate. (No discussion of their disparity is ever forthcoming.) And Flightplan's F/X are nowhere near as seamless as the filmmakers seem to think they are.
An offshoot of the main featurette, "Cabin Pressure: Designing the Aalto-474" (10 mins.) narrows its focus to the picture's airplane set, an engineering marvel that maximizes flexibility–dolly tracks were built along the overhead compartments–without stinting on comfort, detail, or sheer imagination. Red Eye is the superior hijacking thriller of 2005, but all things considered, I'd rather play a passenger in this film. As for the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer* of Flightplan proper, it's wildly uneven; in preparing a capture for this review, I was appalled by the severity of edge-haloes in some shots (note the ringing around Erika Christensen's face in the screenshot above, visible even at this reduced size) and disappointed anew in the general murkiness of the image. Pixellation occasionally rears its head though saturation is irreproachable, and there are periodic stretches where everything looks ideal. If the accompanying DTS audio is ineffably spicier than the Dolby 5.1 alternative, both are satisfyingly immersive and at times aggressively discrete, especially during the climactic deplaning, whose sense of hubbub (ambulances and overhead choppers and whatnot) is created almost entirely through sound. Launching into his yak-track with an interesting observation of the "iconographic" differences between actors and actresses, Schwentke, with a faint trace of a German accent, gives due and equal consideration to the movie's themes and production logistics. He's a bit high on himself but no less gracious or compelling. Sneak peeks at Annapolis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, {proof}, Shadows in the Sun, Everything You Want, The Greatest Game Ever Played, "TV on DVD," and season two of "Lost" round out the Touchstone platter, the first three cuing up automatically on startup. Originally published: January 23, 2006.
*Also available in fullscreen.
