Runtime: 2 hours, 18 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Quick Impressions:
First off, let me just say that I am so jealous of Whip Whitaker’s son. I mean, let’s face it, that admissions essay is going to be phenomenal. With material like that, he can probably get a full ride to the Ivy League school of his choice. And why stop at an essay? Two words for you, son: Book deal. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure his father’s alcoholism made his early life traumatic, and I feel for him. But on the plus side, assuming he knows how to string together coherent sentences, he’s sitting on a goldmine. How come some people get material like that to work with, and the best I could come up with was an essay about what it would be like to take Henry VIII bowling? Of course, I don’t have to live with the scars of having a high profile, alcoholic father, so I suppose there are trade-offs. Plus when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. It’s not like this is a true story. Yes, plane crashes do happen in real life, but this story is entirely fictional.
Flight feels kind of like a throwback to an earlier era. It’s a big-budget, high production value drama carried by a genuine movie star who appears in essentially every scene. It starts off like Airport then gradually descends into the kind of close character study more commonly seen these days in small indie films that never get a wide release. Personally, I think the last half hour is pretty ham-fisted and emotionally manipulative. (At times, it seems like Zemeckis’s style is at odds with the tone of the script.) But Denzel Washington is excellent throughout (of course. I mean, when is he not?) To be honest, I’m quite relieved to see such a strong, Oscar-caliber performance by a leading man.
The thing is, I just hate it when the Oscar race gets stale (as happens practically every year). We all know ten thousand years in advance who’s going to win everything, and all the precursor awards go to the same people over and over again. No one can ever know how ecstatically happy I was back in 2002 when Washington won Best Actor for Training Day. (The thing is, Russell Crowe just won the year before, and his performance wasn’t that special. He’s a great actor, but he doesn’t need to win every year, does he?)
I like an Oscar race that’s outcome actually feels a little bit genuinely uncertain. And forget actually seeing the finished product, when you hear the names Steven Spielberg, Abraham Lincoln, and Daniel Day-Lewis together in the same sentence, you basically know who will likely walk away with the Best Actor Oscar in 2013.
Before the cameras even roll on the movie, you just know. But if anybody can derail that unstoppable, runaway train, it’s Denzel Washington. (I think I’m so funny.)
The thing is, much as I fully believe that would-be contenders like Jack Black in Bernie and Matthew McConaughey in Killer Joe deserve a look, I know that Denzel Washington will get a look. Aside from Joaquin Phoenix, he’s the first realistic male lead Oscar contender I’ve seen so far this year, and that feels pretty exciting. (I’m not saying it’s impossible that Affleck might get a nod for acting. And I’m not saying that Hanks doesn’t deserve one. And I’m certainly not saying that Joaquin Phoenix won’t be nominated despite what seem like flagrantly deliberate attempts to sabotage his own chances. I’m saying I’ll be shocked if Washington doesn’t get in, and when Washington is in the mix, nobody else is a lock. I still have high hopes for John Hawkes, Hugh Jackman, and especially Anthony Hopkins, but I haven’t been able to see any of those performances yet.)
The Good:
Like I said before, this movie seems pretty old fashioned—and for the most part, I mean that in a good way. I loved Cloud Atlas last week, but I can easily appreciate why a mainstream audience might be thrown by such a high concept film and find it off-putting. Flight is exactly the opposite sort of movie. There’s nothing high concept about it at all. It’s a straightforward story about an alcoholic pilot who saves a plane from crashing. It doesn’t pull anything flashy or disorienting. The entire story is told in a direct, linear way from what seems to be a reliable third person perspective. The film asks questions, but you never question the vehicle presenting the story. You don’t even notice it.
For the first hour at least, the movie was a solid crowd pleaser. The audience was extremely interactive, laughing (sometimes inappropriately, though), gasping, and seeming pretty engrossed in what was happening on screen. Personally, I think the last act does not live up to the promise of the set up, but this is not the kind of movie that makes people so fed up that they walk out. You’re not meant to question who is telling you the story or to meditate on why the film falls into the genre it does or to ask any meta-critical questions at all.
You’re just watching a story about a guy. You don’t care about the fact that it is a story. You care about what’s happening in the story. You care about the guy.
And you really do care about him, too. As frustrating as Whip Whitaker can be, you spend two hours and eighteen minutes really getting to know him. Even though Whip’s not a conventional hero (though you might argue that he is a conventional anti-hero), Washington’s earnest performance—clearly requiring great skill but seemingly effortless—makes you concerned about what will happen to the guy.
Denzel Washington’s performance definitely drives the movie. (Or maybe I should say that it keeps the movie aloft.) Some of the supporting performances are fantastic, too. John Goodman is a particular standout and far more worthy of a supporting nomination here than for his small part in Argo. Though others may not agree, I also think that Kelly Reilly gives a great performance as Nicole and deserves supporting actress consideration. Don Cheadle is good, too. And my favorite character in the entire film is that cancer patient in the stairwell, played so charismatically by James Badge Dale.
Flight also has a fantastic, fitting, energetic soundtrack that I’d like to own. I also really liked Alan Silvestri’s score. It was a little melodramatic, but so was the movie. You could always tell how serious things had gotten by how dramatic the music became.
Best Scene Visually:
The opening scene of the movie certainly makes an impression since one of the first things we’re shown is full frontal female nudity. Right away, I thought, Since Robert Zemeckis has made a lot of family films in his career, he probably wants to establish from the first shot that this is a movie for adults only. Flight is a dark story about addiction and pain.
If you were flipping through cable channels and saw a film by Robert Zemeckis starring Denzel Washington, you might well start to watch. But if you had kids in the room with you, the first scene would let you know to keep flipping.
In the parking lot after the movie, I shared this insight with my husband, adding, “Of course, I don’t see any reason why a thirteen-year-old couldn’t watch it. I don’t think a thirteen-year-old would be traumatized or anything.”
He replied, “If I were a thirteen-year-old, I sure wouldn’t be traumatized by seeing a naked woman. I would be like, ‘Okay, I need to go home, right now. I’ll be in my room for a while.’”
By the time the movie had ended, I saw another reason for this stark opening visual, one more symbolic and significant to the story.
Two other visual moments stand out.
One is the chaos inside the main cabin when the plane flips upside down.
The other is something that made an impression on both my husband and me. We loved the bloody tear. (When you see it, you’ll know.)
On the other hand, I hated the non-bloody tear near the end of the movie. Why did we need such an extreme close-up of that? It felt so manipulative and far too emphatic. If Washington has done his work—and he has—the audience should know how to respond in this moment without being prompted by such an annoyingly patronizing visual cue.
Best Action Sequence:
The plane crash is probably the only true action sequence (unless you count fighting and drunken stumbling), so it easily wins by default, which is unfortunate in a sense because this seems to minimize its impact. The scene really is superb. In fact, I think most of the audience watching with me would have been happier if the movie continued to keep up this kind of pace and energy. The scenes in the plane seem ripped from a big-budget disaster movie or fast-paced summer popcorn flick. And immediately after the crash, the momentum continues. We get intense drama followed by high comedy. But then after Whip leaves the hospital, things gradually change until we suddenly realized we’ve been watching a character drama with a very tight focus on one miserable person struggling to overcome a lifelong alcohol addiction.
Think Titanic, in which a chick-flicky romance happens in the middle of a disaster movie. During the early action scenes of Flight, you feel like you’re watching Airport, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that what you’re actually watching is Leaving Las Vegas II starring Denzel Washington.
After the film, my husband and I agreed that equally entertaining films could have resulted from telling the story from the point of view of another character—a member the team investigating, one of the passengers on the airline, Margaret, the flight attendant.
Flight is less about the plane crash that sets things in motion than the crash after crash after crash experienced by the tormented pilot as he slips further and further into the grip of alcoholism.
Washington’s performance is great throughout, but I think Zemeckis’s film does a better job with the grand drama of the plane crash than with the personal drama of the pilot. The sequences in the crashing plane are among the most riveting and engaging in the movie.
Best Scene:
Hands down, the smoking scene in the hospital stairwell made the movie for me, almost entirely because of the natural charisma of James Badge Dale, an actor not even on my radar before I saw this film. Though brief, Dale’s presence is a highlight of the movie. Normally, to get Oscar attention, an actor has to have either A) Considerably more screentime than Dale, or B) A considerably bigger name. I mean, Judi Dench won an Oscar for stepping across a mud puddle in Shakespeare in Love, but she was Judi Dench and had lost for a superlative performance as Queen Victoria the year before. Dale, on the
other hand, seems to have popped up from out of nowhere to hang around in the
hospital stairwell for a handful of minutes.
He’s so wonderful, though. When he left, I wanted to follow him, even if that meant leaving Kelly Reilly and Denzel Washington in the stairwell.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Denzel Washington):
Washington carries this movie. It’s a great part, and he’s a great actor, a winning combination. The first moment that really stood out to me was what he tells Margaret (Tamara Tunie) to say into the black box. (I loved the Margaret character in general and the way that our understanding of their relationship changed as the movie progressed.) Why doesn’t Whip say anything like that himself? Such a fascinating moment!
I also found the moment just after Bruce Greenwood’s character leaves his hospital room incredibly moving and effective.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (John Goodman):
John Goodman is definitely the funniest character in the movie, and his first and last scenes
vie for being the most amusing. (Don Cheadle’s interactions in the “cocoa puff” scene are also priceless.) This is a more substantial, more demanding, and ultimately more flamboyant role than Goodman had in Argo, so if he does somehow pull off a Best Supporting Actor nomination, it ought to be for his work here.
His first scene in the hospital room with Whip caused practically everyone in the theater to burst out laughing over and over again.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Kelly Reilly):
I kept trying to place Kelly Reilly the entire time (unsuccessfully). (I’m assuming that I remember her face from the recent Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies in which she plays Watson’s wife.) She gives a really strong, emotionally powerful performance here. I’m surprised no one has mentioned her name when discussing Best Supporting Actress. I think she at least deserves a moment of consideration. She made me thoroughly believe and care about her character. I think I like her best in the stairwell scene, too, though she’s also pretty great as she listens to Whip’s escape plan.
The Other Performances:
Don Cheadle is very good as always, and Melissa Leo is refreshingly quiet and understated in a small role near the end of the film.
The Negatives:
Let me begin by saying that Robert Zemeckis has written and directed a number of great movies while I have written and directed no movies at all. My personal favorite film by Zemeckis is (the, I feel, extremely underrated) What Lies Beneath. (That’s one of the earliest cases I can remember of the preview spoiling the entire movie. Now it happens all the time, but back then, it was so shocking and egregious. Now that some time has passed, the preview thing is less of an issue, and the movie holds up pretty well on repeat viewings.)
My point is, when I first saw them, I loved Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and, to a lesser degree, Forest Gump. Zemeckis definitely has a signature style. When you watch one of his films, you can tell that it’s his. And I’m not knocking that style at all. It has this grand, sweeping, cinematic feel to it. I think on the whole, Zemeckis does wonderful work.
But here’s the thing.
At many moments while watching Flight (especially toward the end of the movie), I felt that Zemeckis’s style wasn’t meshing well with the story he was trying to tell. The moment when we zoom in on the tiny bottle on top of the minibar made me flashback to so many fond childhood movie experiences. The camera angle, the way the shot was set up, even the way the music and the staging gave it such significance—this all reminded me terribly of Back to the Future. But it felt out of place in this kind of close character study. It felt too big, too grand and sweeping, when what was happening was more of an internal crisis that need close, small, minimal stuff.
In the latter part of this movie, the story isn’t in the spectacle, but Zemeckis keeps giving us the spectacle, anyway, which made the whole thing seem a little too forced.
Beyond this, the problem with the movie is that the set up is as conventional and contrived as it is in any disaster movie. But nobody cares about that. In The Poseidon Adventure, you don’t care why the boat is all upside down and falling apart. The point is, they’ve got to escape, and who are they, and how are they going to do it. In Flight, the Captain’s escape plan is radical, effective, novel, and fascinating. But it only lasts like five minutes. And then instead of giving us more original, breathtaking stuff, the movie gives us a second mundane, conventional, contrived set up. Wanting to explore one man’s struggle with alcoholism is noble but far from original. The plane crash gets us all excited and ready for more excitement, but we don’t get what we’re expecting. We get something else instead that (though without question well done) may seem boring and unsatisfactory to many in the
audience.
The co-pilot’s character also seems excessively strange (or at least underdeveloped) to me. (I would love to see the story from that guy’s point of view. I think he’s got even more going on that Denzel Washington’s character!)
Here’s what really bugs me, though. I like the way the ending of the movie sort of dismantles what’s essentially a false dilemma earlier in the story. (I mean, for most of the movie, you get the feeling it’s kill or be killed for Whip when the stakes are not, in fact, quite that high.) But I can’t help wondering if what happens at the end is the right thing. I know that it solves one problem. Still I can’t help thinking that it may contribute to a gross miscarriage of justice by helping to allow someone incredibly guilty to appear more innocent. That bugs me. To be honest, I thought the movie fell apart a little bit at the end. Once Washington arrived at the hotel, it all started to seem sort of slipshod and by-the-numbers until the very last scene in the movie which I liked very much.
Audience Report:
We saw Flight in a Cinemark theater in XD, Cinemark’s answer to IMAX. The screen is bigger, the seats are wider, the sound is better, the arm rests are movable, the auditorium is fresher (and doesn’t stink of decades old B.O.), and the price reflects all of this.
As my husband and I stepped up to the box office to buy our tickets, the couple in the line beside us said, “Two seniors for Flight.”
The ticket seller replied, “That will be $21.”
“What?!” the woman exclaimed in horror.
Misunderstanding her problem, the ticket seller repeated in a voice that was insultingly loud, “THAT WILL BE $21.”
Now offended as well as shocked, the woman sourly reiterated, “I said two seniors.”
The girl working box office proceeded to explain about XD. The woman was not impressed. “Then just forget it,” she finally scoffed and dragged her husband away in a huff.
As soon as they left, another elderly couple replaced them at the ticket window, and I watched in disbelief as what now seemed like a comedy routine began again. Another, “Two seniors for Flight.”
Another exclamation of disbelief at the price. (At least the ticket seller understood the situation correctly this time and started explaining XD right away instead of acting like she was trying to get Patty Duke to have a breakthrough in The Miracle Worker.)
Then, while we were waiting for our popcorn, a third couple walked up to the counter. The wife was bemoaning the unexpected expense of the movie. “I can’t believe it! Twenty-one dollars for two seniors!” Trying to soothe her, the husband decided, “Well, now that we’re here, let’s just try to enjoy it.”
Later, while sitting in the theater waiting for the movie to start, I saw yet another elderly couple enter the auditorium. As they passed by our row, I heard them muttering together about what an unexpected rip-off XD is. “Twenty-one dollars for two seniors! How can anybody afford to go?”
Has it been that long since Robert Zemeckis directed a live-action movie? Most people watching with us clearly wanted to time travel back to 1985 when an entire family could see a Robert Zemeckis hit for less than $21. (In fact, I think I’m one of those people. I saw Back to the Future at the drive-in when I was six and found the back seat of my parents’ car far more comfortable than the XD auditorium.)
The audience was also extremely responsive, which fascinated me. The movie is often screamingly funny, but people also laughed at moments that didn’t seem amusing at all to me. At the end, the man behind me said to the woman with him, “Sorry. I didn’t expect that to be such a downer.” Then I laughed inappropriately—because, I mean, it’s a movie about a plane crash and the troubled pilot who lands the plane safely. Fortunately, the guy didn’t hear me.
Overall:
Denzel Washington gives a best actor worthy performance in Flight, an uncomplicated film about an extremely complicated man. Personally, I think the big, exterior scenes work better than the small, interior ones, but the movie is still incredibly entertaining with a great soundtrack and supporting cast.