With the recent crop of big guns brought out to compete over each other for the various international awards being dished by committees of the film industry, there is an obvious upturn of general quality at the cinema at the moment. However, there hasn’t been one that closes in on perfection like any worthy winner deserves to. That was until Flight touched down on our cinematic runaway in the UK.
Alcoholic divorced airline pilot ‘Whip’ Whitaker (Denzel Washington, Unstoppable) wakes up after a night with one of his cabin crew, downs some booze, snorts some cocaine and goes to work. After a reckless take off in the middle of a storm and suspicion of drinking on the job, the plane suddenly fails and goes into a nosedive. Through quick thinking and actions, Whip manages to fly the plane upside down before making a relatively safe crash landing in a field outside Atlanta. Despite the six deaths, Whip is hailed by the media as a hero saving over 90 lives. The suspicions of his drinking come back to haunt him as a failed toxicology report threatens to come out in public at a hearing in the crash, whilst Whip struggles to hide his rampaging alcoholism from the people who care about him.
Washington is as good an actor as any, but give him a superb character like Whip to portray and he becomes magical. He convinces us that he really is a raging alcoholic so well that it’s a struggle to see the distinction between actor and character at times; that’s how simply awesome he is here. Washington nails all the traits of any good alcoholic; constant lying to protect himself, multiple moments of self realisation before sinking back into his safety net of booze, and struggling to man up and sort himself out. With such realism to his performance, Washington deserves every award under the sun.
The supporting cast doesn’t disappoint either. Kelly Reilly (Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows) plays Whip’s junkie love interest who resolves to clean herself up after seeing what she could become. She convinces as the quiet opposite to Whip as she just gets on with her own rehab, rather than makes these declarations of going straight like Whip shouts about half the time. Whip’s defence attorney, Hugh Lang, is made believable by Don Cheadle (Iron Man 2) as one of the lawyer types who has never lost a case and whose job it is to get Whip off many possible major manslaughter charges at the hearing, no matter the moral cost.
Bruce Greenwood (Super 8) as Charlie is a moral anchor for Whip as someone who has flown with him in the Navy and is one of his best friends but at the same time doesn’t want his pilot’s union jeopardised by a drunk, creating an intriguing confliction of interests. John Goodman’s (Argo) career seems to have settled down nowadays as comic relief and he plays up to this as Whip’s drug dealer friend/confidant to take the overall edge off the severity of the alcoholism issue.
What’s surprising to me is how few films there are which deal such a vast issue like alcoholism. Mainly played for comedy purposes when it is a subject matter, I struggled to recall a serious, straight movie which dealt with the dreaded drink. In Flight, it’s portrayed as a mental health issue which Whip has to conquer through his own admittance. Despite some seriously dodgy decisions, the constant lying and too many times he drinks himself to sleep, Whip is not without sympathy but at the same time you are drawn to intensely dislike him. It all builds to an exceptional and emotionally driven climax as this man we’ve come to get behind over the runtime may end up disappointing us for the last time.
Needless to say, the plane scenes which fill the opening 30 minutes are brutally realistic. We’ve all been through turbulence before and the bumpy take off acts as a tease to what you know can happen before all hell breaks loose the usually safe aeroplane plummets from the sky. With people being chucked about and luggage flying everywhere before the plane is turned upside down, it’s some certainly harrowing scenes to watch before Whip gets on the job. Excellent work done to make it as real as possible for added effect on audiences.
What’s more surprising is the budget this film has. $30 million isn’t something to be sneered at being low budget but Flight generally looks like a superb movie with no poor effects or dip in quality. It’s near blood-out-of-a-stone levels of using a budget effectively, in comparison to something on a similar amount of money like The Last Stand which is a poorer looking film made on the same sum.
All this is achieved by director Robert Zemeckis. After dabbling in computer generated and motion capture pictures for the last decade or so, Flight is Zemeckis’ first live action film since Castaway. I like his style a lot, embracing great effects and model work like the various time travel trips in the Back To The Future series and the blue screen (reality meets cartoons) method used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and this film is no different. It’s easily his most serious piece dealing with the alcohol issue and deserves all the plaudits coming his way, creating a top, depressing, character-driven, plot.
But Flight probably isn’t getting talked up much during the American Award Season we’re stuck in, because of 9/11; we’ve had movies before that dealt with the actual events of the day, but there hasn’t been anything as harrowing shot on film since then (such as the opening plane crash we have in Flight). They rather dish out to the more positive side of America where it does well, like Lincoln and Argo, rather than revisit dark days. It’s a very sensitive issue to a lot of Americans, but at the same time I don’t see why that they shouldn’t back a great piece of cinema such as this, as this is the kind of media to help recover a general populace.
Barring some interfering, out of place comedy right before the climax, it’s a struggle to think of a single critique of this masterpiece; this film has no faults. Smashing all round cast, brilliant direction, and going places people would rather not see (in terms of alcohol abuse), Flight is an extraordinary character-driven film which flies you to some dark, depressing places before bringing you back into the light.
Terry Lewis – @thatterrylewis.
