Flight

It is kind of amazing how often trailers can be misleading. The trailers set out to make Flight look like a pretty intense thriller about a plane crash and the hero of the crash. I read reviews playing up the intense and brutal nature of the crash and I was prepared to watch an intense legal (ish) thriller featuring Denzel as a wounded hero. What you actually get with Flight is a full on character drama. The plane crash almost becomes nothing more than a plot point used to jump start the real film. This is not a complaint, or an endorsement, just letting you know that if you go see Flight expecting a thriller or a big effects driven plane crash, you are going into the wrong movie.

Captain Whip Whitaker(Denzel Washington) wakes up to his phone ringing. At first everything is just slightly out of focus. As things come into focus, what appears is a hotel room full of empty alcohol bottles, a super sexy naked woman(Nadine Velazquez) and clothes strewn everywhere. Whitaker is loudly and crassly arguing with what appears to be his ex wife over money for his son. To calm himself he takes a swig of beer, presumably luke warm beer from a half finished can. After he hangs up the phone, he snorts a line of cocaine and he and the sexy flight attendant go on their way. Hungover and high on cocaine, Whitaker proceeds to get behind the wheel of a commercial airplane and fly through rough turbulence. Once they get to clear skies, Whitaker sneaks 3 mini bottle of vodka into some Orange juice, and drinks some more. Without warning the plane starts to go down. In a freefall nose dive, Whitaker finds a way to miraculously land the plane with only 6 passengers dead. Whitaker himself suffers pretty minor injuries for a crash like that. Because people demand answers from plane crashes, we get a story of one man's severe alcoholism, with the plane crash serving as our out entrance into this man's life. If Whitaker could just manage to stay sober he can probably stay out of jail and retain his pilot's licence.

Flight asks some very tough questions. Whitaker is a hero. he saved nearly 100 lives and very early on we know that his drinking/drug using had nothing to do with the plane crashing. He is a true hero, but is he? His ex-wife hates him, his teenage son hates him. He pushes away his only friend (Bruce Greenwood) and eventually he pushes away his love interest (played tenderly, but toughly by Kelly Reilly). Do we root for this man to get away completely free? Do we want this hero to go to jail for flying under the influence and breaking his ethics code and the law even though he saved the lives of 100 people? There are no easy answers and Flight is not interested in easy answers. Flight is simply presenting its audience with this series of questions. Whitaker is a man on the brink of losing everything in his life and all he has to do to make it out is not drink. It was that simple. Stay sober and keep your life. Alcohol has a strangle hold on him though. Flight quickly turns into the story of addiction and how it does not care if you are a good person, a bad person, or anything in between. it simply just latches onto someone and hangs on for as long as it can.

Denzel is simply amazing as Whitaker. He is arrogant and damaged. He is both hero and villain, at the same time. he takes Whitaker to very dark places, getting rid of vanity, hope, and charm. he lives inside this alcoholic to the point where I completely lost Denzel. Playing drunk on screen is not easy. People ham it up all of the time, but Denzel plays drunk with more conviction, more sadness and more embarrassment than I can remember seeing from anyone. As the movie goes on we start to see ourselves conflicted with Whitaker because we do not understand his addiction. We see a man who saved lives fall further and further away and be replaced by a man who passes out on the floor next to his television because he cannot get himself up from his drunken stupor.

Robert Zemeckis, the director of this film is also in top form. After years of only directing motion capture movies, Zemeckis' return to live action is triumphant. Many directors would have gone for the big money shot of the plane landing. Not Zemeckis. We only see the plane crash after the fact on a handheld camera phone. It was in that moment that I knew I was in for a treat. Zemeckis has made us so far removed from the plane landing that it allows the movie to move focus on Whitaker's addiction. His pacing is excellent and the way he lingers the camera just long enough on a bottle of alcohol is stirring in the right moments. When you add John Goodman's brilliant three scenes, Don Cheadle's always solid acting work and some of the best music picked for a movie, you are in for a treat.

Flight is gripping, but not in the way I expected. It is not a traditional character study, but it is not a plot driven movie either. It falls somewhere between those two things. It asks us where we are morally, instead of telling us where we are morally. It features one of Denzel's best performances and one of Denzel's best moments in a movie. His final courtroom scene is breathtaking. Every thing he says and does not say means something. Every pause for water is wrenching. He is on the edge of a cliff and we spend 2 hours wondering if he will jump and when the times to find out what he is going to do, oh man he knocks it out of the park. If there are 5 performances better than that this year, then this might be the best year for male performances ever. That is how good he is.