Flight

Film (2012)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

With Nadine Velazquez (Katerina Marquez), Denzel Washington (Whip Whitaker), Kelly Reilly (Nicole), Bruce Greenwood (Charlie Anderson), John Goodman (Harling Mays), Don Cheadle (Hugh Lang), Melissa Leo (Ellen Block)

Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a pilot for a regional airline, lives a life bordering on the dissolute. Despite operating under compromised personal conditions on the job, he confronts a situation in which his estimable talents come to the fore. In the follow-up, his habits and dependencies come to light and it causes him to begin to confront his issues. Along the way, he encounters Nicole (Kelly Reilly) who faces her own potent demons, and together they begin to navigate through the difficulties.

Robert Zemeckis, who famously directed Back To the Future (1985) and Forrest Gump (1994), two very successful and imaginative fables, has a tendency to sentimentalize. Both of those films are heavily imbued with a kind of mythological aura, enabling that sentimentality to work fairly well. Any dose of realism in those films gets framed within the fable-like halo which cushions it, and trumps it when necessary.

In this film, however, the healthy dose of realism tries that balance much more than in those previous successes. Here, the down-to-earth issues of professional competence and substance abuse are the main foci but they get wrapped into an unexpected aeronautical accomplishment of the sort made iconic by Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger (who heroically landed a jet in the Hudson River near New York City in 2009, saving all passengers aboard). The fable and the harsh realism never seem to mix.

The elements of realism which work considerably better on their own here involve the relationship between the tormented protagonist and his equally tortured romantic interest. Kelly Reilly as Nicole, the sultry but complex woman friend, plays the balance between down and out and resiliently determined very well. Her sweetly pathetic vulnerability also provides a good counterpart to Denzel Washington’s portrayal of a more austerely personal subversion.

Washington is quite good in this role, though he seems generally more comfortable in more nobly heroic ones. Though he is not bad here, it feels harder to sign on to him in this more psychologically complex performance.

The greater problem, however, is the script, and that may account for the general difficulty. Though its overall trajectory is reasonable, there is a lot of bumbling along the way. It seems full of extraneous and gratuitous additions that might easily have been trimmed to make a more cogent film. Its does not really merit the two and a quarter hours it takes up.

Despite the inconstant script, Zemeckis’ direction is pretty good. He draws very good, concise performances from Don Cheadle (Hugh Lang) as a union lawyer, and from John Goodman (Harling Mays) as one of Whip’s humorous, but less up and up, affiliations. Melissa Leo (Ellen Block) has a short piece at the end as an aviation investigator and is quite effective.

The editing struck me as not very subtle, often yielding strange transitions. The music and sound design also struck me as contributing to the overly sentimental tone.

The title “Flight” is literally about flying airplanes, but is also, just a little too obviously, metaphoric. This suggests something of the approach, which is also just a bit too heavy handed in that regard. Repeatedly shown scenes of a decapitated church steeple near the site of a tragic accident exemplifies this inclination to instruct the audience a little too much. In Forrest Gump, a leaf blown around in the wind takes on a laden philosophical meaning, but there it somehow feels more appropriate, as a fitting emblem of a taller tale.

– BADMan