Flight (2012)

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, Melissa Leo
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers We open on a dingy little hotel room. It's
hard to say what the night before was, but this is definitely a "morning after." A beautiful woman (Nadine Velazquez) emerges from bed, fully nude. There's another warm body
there, a man, churning and groaning awake beneath the covers. He stirs to take a
phone call from an ex-wife about child support while the woman gets dressed, unfazed. Finally the man, Whip (Denzel
Washington), wills himself out of bed to sip his morning coffee, or in this
case, to take a giant toot of cocaine. The film then cuts to him at work–he's
an airline pilot. It's a sickly funny reveal unavoidably ruined by the trailer,
the commercials, even the poster image of Washington in uniform, but what's
fascinating is how the joke now works in reverse: The audience starts tittering
in disbelief the moment Whip is introduced, since they already know what he
does for a living.

While seeing Robert Zemeckis's name on this
movie definitely causes a bit of cognitive dissonance in the gritty early going, this
is your first clue that he directed it: A big part of the Zemeckis Experience
is having the major movements spoiled in advance by the marketing–the most
notorious example being the trailer for Cast Away, which gave away Tom
Hanks's eventual rescue from his desert-isle purgatory. (I'd call it Brechtian if exposure to advertising materials were actually mandatory.)
Your second clue is that said coke-snort suddenly frees the camera from its
axis, transforming a classic Hollywood close-up into a rubbery high-angle on
Washington. Unlike so many trick shots in the Zemeckis canon (the floor
P.O.V. of Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, the through-the-mirror
pull-back on Jena Malone in Contact), however, it's a perfect marriage of form
and function–discombobulating in a productive way.

Whip abuses drugs and
alcohol both on the job and off. Nestling into the cockpit in the morning, the
first thing he does is suck down the emergency oxygen supply, Frank
Booth-style, while his new, young co-pilot (Brian Geraghty) looks on in dismay. But Flight
isn't about an alcoholic who crashes a plane; it's about a man
who pilots a doomed plane to relative safety in spite of his alcoholism. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline, freckly Nicole (Kelly Reilly) pulls
an Uma Thurman-in-Pulp Fiction, OD'ing on heroin by inhaling it instead
of injecting it. This lands her in hospital, where she meets a banged-up Whip.
The two begin a decreasingly co-dependent relationship that always seems chaster than it should (is there any couple sexually hungrier for each other than two addicts?),
perhaps as a by-product of Washington's notorious reticence to
promote miscegenation.

It's worth noting that in our introduction to her, Nicole is scoring drugs on a porno set that does not exactly ring with
verisimilitude (for starters, this scene takes place in Atlanta–who shoots porn
outside the Valley?); this is the kind of movie that no doubt triple-checked
every gyroscope for scientific accuracy but coasted on assumptions and clichés
when it came to depicting the adult-entertainment industry. It may not have any bearing on the
plot, but it is reflective of Nicole feeling like an afterthought, and Reilly, just as porcelain and starstruck as she is in the Sherlock Holmes films, has
a difficult time staying afloat in a sea of big, juicy performances, including
John Goodman as Whip's proudly unrepentant dealer. Washington has better
chemistry with Tamara Tunie, playing another flight attendant who sees through
Whip's bullshit as he tries to whitewash his drinking habits before her
deposition. Still, it's not that Tunie should be playing Nicole–she's
indispensable where she is. Although Nicole could use a more dynamic actress,
the real problem is that the character's only there to provide dramatic shorthand–to serve as a barometer of Whip's sobriety.

The question of the film is whether Whip
should admit to being intoxicated when the plane went down, since the two things are, in
Zemeckis's words, apples and oranges. He faces criminal charges if he does, and
this would undoubtedly erase any memory of his heroics whilst allowing the
monolithic airline to share accountability for putting a broken boat in the
air. If he doesn't, well…the filmmakers sneakily move the
goalposts. That naked woman we saw in the prologue? She was another of
Whip's flight attendants, and a rare casualty of the crash. She was also a
recovering alcoholic, and when some of Whip's discarded bottles of booze are
found at the crash site, his only recourse is to say they were hers. Will he
allow poor Katerina Marquez, who selflessly aided the passengers when disaster struck, to die in vain? That's a less interesting moral dilemma, if you ask me,
because it sentimentalizes the stakes and baits mainly test audiences, champing
at the bit to rate Whip as "unlikeable" on their NRG scorecards.

Flight is a depature for Zemeckis, yes, but so were the
wintry animated movies (from live-action and Oscar bait), so was Forrest
Gump (from the Spielbergia), and so was Romancing the Stone (from
the zany farces). He is nothing if not a prismatic director whose true niche is
technical innovation, though after a decade spent trying to sell us on a MoCap genre we didn't want*, he seems to have no interest in
reinventing the wheel with Flight. But the disappointment of the film is
its gradual retreat from the grey area the high-functioning alcoholic represents. This
being Zemeckis, there are discrete moments that dazzle–not so much visually as
conceptually, thus harking back to his Used Cars days. I love, for instance, that
Whip's hotel room looks like there was a grizzly-bear attack after he goes on a
bender, and I love the way Whip's conflicted union reps (Bruce Greenwood and Don
Cheadle, reunited at last with his Devil in a Blue Dress co-star Washington)
become accessories to his sordid lifestyle in a raucous attempt to sober him
up. And the climactic hearing is a corker, although the threat that Zemeckis will
turn into Frank Capra is constant and large-looming. It happens to the best of
them. Follow Bill Chambers on Twitter

*You might say that Washington as well spent the past ten years making cartoons.