Flight is like Leaving Las Vegas on an airplane, like Crazy Heart with a Rolling Stone’s soundtrack, like Country Strong without Gwyneth Paltrow, like The Bad News Bears sans baseball, Young Adult without the pursed puppy, and Bad Santa set in August.
This is not to say that Flight is bad; in truth, certain moments on the airplane turn you into a white-knuckle viewer. The turbulence and intensity is real, something I haven’t even recently felt during 3-D movies designed to bring you into an airplane’s cockpit. In addition, Denzel Washington gives a characteristically strong performance as Whip Whitaker, a former Navy pilot whose struggles with alcoholism cloud his best actions. Whitaker is the definition of a functioning alcoholic. Yes, there are extreme, slur-filled benders, but most often, he’s capable of driving, walking, talking, and flying – so long as his consumption of alcohol is met with a ratio of cocaine that keeps him level.
But, Flight – like the films above – follows a familiar arc dealing with their afflicted, alcoholic protagonist. We meet them on what we might consider a bender, but they call a Tuesday. Variously sized liquor bottles, from airplane to liter, litter a nightstand as do assorted varietals. They are indiscriminate and would drink paint thinner if it were available. Most often, cigarettes overflow an ashtray, or, at the very least a crumpled pack or two hangs out on the bed with their passed-out body.
This is how we meet Whip. A screaming alarm clock wakes his drunken body at 7:15am; Katarina (Nadine Velazquez), his tryst from the night before stumbles around the hotel naked; his ex-wife calls to inform us that he’s already broken one family and lost contact with his teenage son. Whip and his stewardess do a few lines of cocaine before their 9:00am flight.
His presence as the pilot on the plane foreshadows its crash, but Flight maintains focus on Whip’s functionality. He’s drunk from the night before, but not visibly; he mixes three airplane bottles of vodka with a tall orange juice, but this hardly impacts him – aside from his sleeping for twenty-six minutes during the flight.
Prior to this, we see how calm and collected he is in the face of a turbulent ascent, clearly a metaphor for his alcoholism. The more he ingests, the higher he gets, the calmer he gets. This is certainly the most enthralling sequence of the film, one that in fact might detract from the more subdued narrative throughout the remainder.
However, Washington’s calm tone and Zemeckis’ tight shots on the pilots’ faces, the windows of the cockpit, and the machinery suck the viewer on the same precarious trip to Atlanta. And then the calm. The plane is leveled out, we rise above the storm, and Whip falls asleep.
Until the plane malfunctions and his calm demeanor persists through a Top Gun-style inversion and aeronautics acumen out of a Las Vegas Aeorbatics handbook.
Despite the heroics, four people die in the crash. (Really, six die, but two “don’t count” because they were crew, a “workman’s comp issue.”) And, according to Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle), a lawyer for Whip and his airline, “Death demands responsibility.” Here, writer John Gatins veers slightly from the traditional arc and shifts the narrative to the American obsession with lawsuits. He doesn’t suggest that a lawsuit shouldn’t be brought against the airplane, but the subsequent investigation focuses, initially, more on Whip’s transgressions than on the airlines irresponsibility. (A piece used for repair was well below standards.) Regardless, the polarizing pejorative, alcoholism, becomes the target of aggression. Even the crew who sees Whip’s heroics, calm, and ability can’t help but chastise him for being drunk while flying.
Therefore, the discourse becomes about strengths, weaknesses, and responsibility. It also dives into ethical gray area. Lang is tasked with keeping Whip clean. Clearly, this doesn’t happen, so they call in Whip’s “brother” (John Goodman), to prepare Whip for his big day in court with a few lines of coke and some makeshift crack – to avoid a lawsuit against the pilot’s union.
Despite Flight’s attempts to shift focus to something new within this trope, it often finds itself attracted to the original – almost like an addition.
[Somewhere, this is happening: Hello, I’m Robert, and I made a movie about alcoholism.]
Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a heroin-addicted love interest with ties to pornography and prostitution enters the picture. They end up in the same hospital, and they develop and inexplicable connection. Sure, they’re connected through addiction, understanding, and being lost souls. We get it. We’ve seen it. We know how it ends – just like it does.
And while the hearing scene at the end is marvelously acted, it ends like we know it will – at rock bottom with recognition, confession, admission, and ultimately, a man reborn. I did want Whip to succeed; I just didn’t need to soliloquy.
