Flight (2012)

No question about it, Denzel Washington is one of the finest actors around, one of that rare remarkable breed of performers whose work is always worth the price of admission, no matter the vehicle.  Fortunately for Flight, Denzel is on board; it’s difficult to imagine this film being as compelling with a less gifted actor in the pilot’s seat.

In Flight, Denzel stars as Captain William “Whip” Whittaker, a star airline pilot with a major substance abuse whose life is thrust into the eye of the media after miraculously saving a plane from mechanical failure.  On his road to recovery, Whip strikes up a bond with fellow addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly), while his lawyer (Don Cheadle) and union rep (Bruce Greenwood) try to save him from prison.

Flight could have been disastrous.  The marketing touts this film as an intense thriller about finding the truth behind a mysterious crash-landing, but what you actually get are two very depressing hours in which Denzel drinks and refuses help from everyone close to him.  This should not be a pleasant moviegoing experience.  But, like Whip, Denzel manages to save the movie from catastrophe by being so good at what he does.

Denzel plays drunk better than anyone in recent memory, recalling the Oscar-winning performance by Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart but with more fearless sophistication.  The key, he says, is that intoxicated people pretend they’re not drunk, and Whip’s continual rejection of his problem coupled with his insistence that he’s “good” give us a subtle depiction of a man who’s almost always toeing the precarious line between sobriety and jeopardy.  The film is so very nearly exclusively Denzel’s that I’m wondering if we’re looking at another Oscar nod for the man, who commands the film in ways very similar to Daniel Day-Lewis’s highly engaging work in Lincoln.

Indeed, you could strip away much of what else works in Flight and still have a central performance successful enough to carry a film on its own.  Cheadle and Greenwood are solid in supporting roles that require their patience with Whip’s frustrating regressions, but their characters never really pay off in the way that John Goodman’s cocaine dealer does; equal parts Walter Sobchak and The Dude, Goodman struts to the sounds of “Sympathy for the Devil” in two key scenes that advance the plot but introduce tricky moral choices that might leave the audience wondering just what’s being sanctioned.  This is to say nothing of the curious and nameless cancer patient played by James Badge Dale (you know him as Jack Bauer’s partner from Season 3), who’s introduced as a man potentially with all the answers, but the film never revisits him, neither physically nor thematically; it’s a shame, because the character is charming and memorable, and he says some particularly pointed themes on which the film ought to follow up.

Disappointingly, the biggest supporting role – one that’s almost set up as a featured co-lead – is Reilly’s turn as Nicole.  Introduced in an opening that pairs her personal rock-bottom with Whip’s midair emergency, Nicole never quite accomplishes anything other than serving as a kind of billboard for Alcoholics Anonymous.  She’s set up as a voice of reason, an exit for Whip from his disastrous lifestyle, and some of the scenes where she’s unable to save Whip are heartbreaking.  But the film’s investment in her dissipates when she exits the film without casting an eye back; at the film’s end, Whip’s hollow reunion with his estranged son might have rang truer had the film made peace instead with Whip’s unresolved relationship with Nicole (something the film only alludes to in photographs, a blatant storytelling cheat).

But where director Robert Zemeckis wisely allows the film to be Denzel’s, the disproportionate balancing act he plays with the supporting cast doesn’t carry over to his competency in the film’s crucial airplane scene, which is as viscerally terrifying as recent aerial trauma films like United 93 or even some of the less schmaltzy scenes of the Final Destination franchise.  As much as I deplore the shaky cam technique, Zemeckis makes it work here, helping us to forget that we’re watching a soundstage filmed upside down.  If there’s a complaint to be had about this scene, as successful as it is, it’s that I never quite felt in danger with Denzel at the helm.  Forget what the trailers gave away; I’d let Denzel pilot my airplane, substance abuse or not.

Ultimately, Flight is a movie that by all accounts shouldn’t work as well as it does.  There are several filmmaking missteps, including the fact that the movie never quite lives up to its highly compelling opening act.  But this is as much a Denzel Washington vehicle as anything else, and in this respect Flight earns high marks for allowing a star performer to wield his craft with as much dignity and dexterity as he possesses.

Flight is rated R “for drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality/nudity and an intense action sequence.”  As mentioned above, Denzel drinks, smokes, and ingests cocaine several times in the film, almost always to excess.  The film begins with Denzel in and out of bed with a fully nude stewardess, but after that the film is mostly chaste; the old buttocks/hospital gown gag is trotted out once more but is played for a weak laugh.  And most viewers will probably find the midair catastrophe distressing, as is its somewhat bloody and wrecked aftermath.