Fear Of Flying
Denzel Takes Off
We In The Office, Baby
In the film, Whitaker has a son who plays a pivotal role in the
plot. This is a role we can write in our heads as the film
proceeds, and maybe that’s why Zemeckis left what should have
been character-building scenes with the son on the cutting room
floor. The son is thus reduced to a plot device, which may have
been intentional. Zemeckis is hardly some inept hack, and, as
stated, I believe this film was deliberately designed to work
with audience’s expectations for fast-food action flicks. He has
a son. We know the son exists for these plot points—A, B, and C.
why waste time lingering over the son when the audience already
knows why he exists in the film? I was left, however, with a
deep dissatisfaction of the lack of layering for the son and
Nicole, Kelly Reilly’s drug addict, for a clearer trajectory of
the impact Whip had on their lives. Many of those points were
simply left to audience assumption based on other movies we’ve
seen, including the last two sadly predictable mass transit
films Denzel made, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 where
Washington gained 40 pounds for no plot reason whatsoever and
then sat around for 90 minutes while being upstaged by John
Travolta’s 1-note hammy overacting (why do audiences continue to
buy tickets to Travolta’s tone-deaf acting?), and
Unstoppable, a hackneyed and clichéd Training Day
wannabe featuring Denzel sitting around for 90 minutes, getting
a crick in his neck from looking back over his shoulder as he
drives a train backward while Christopher Pine (who played an
awful Captain Kirk in 2009’s
lifeless Star Trek reboot) grimaces and feeds Washington
lines for Washington to school the young buck on how things work
on a railroad (“We IN The Office, Baby”).
Here Washington ironically teams with Bruce Greenwood, who
grandly upstaged Pine in 2009 Trek as Kirk’s benefactor, Captain
Christopher Pike. Greenwood, a wonderful actor who has, for
whatever reason, never broken through to superstardom, turns in
a wonderfully nuanced performance as a representative of the
pilot’s union, as does the Thank God He’s In This Movie Don
Cheadle, who once again reinvents himself so thoroughly as a
brilliant defense attorney that, if he didn’t actually look like
Don Cheadle, you wouldn’t know Cheadle was in there. It is
through these performances and that of John Goodman as
Washington’s enabler/fixer, that you see the actual film
Zemeckis intended to make. So much so that it fosters
speculation that the gratuitous nude scene and action sequence
right up front may have, in fact, been added at the behest of
the studio, because the remainder of the presentation is a
completely different (and far more interesting) film.
The formulaic way to have approached this would have been to mix
the action flick with the character study. The hit ABC serial
Lost teased its plane crash, the centerpiece of the show,
for more than two full seasons before you got the complete story
of what happened up there and why. Similarly, Flight
could have opened with Denzel in the hospital, and doled out the
thunder along the way as Whip remembers what happened. That
approach, which I am sure was discussed if not demanded by
studio execs who know what a risk straying from formula can be,
would have made Flight a more satisfying film, as we
tease the action events which enables the filmmaker to thus
replay them, over and over, from many angles, throughout the
film. Zemeckis took the high road, however, resolving his film
from a blockbuster action thriller to the fringes of independent
film, out in low-budget, quiet country, where Whip Whitaker’s
story is told through Denzel’s eyes and the intensity of an
amazing approximation of “real” life.
It is likely that many if not most moviegoers, lured in by the
idea of a big action flick, wandered out of the film shaking
their heads in disappointment. Ours is simply not an
intellectual environment in which a film like Flight can
exist. The film climaxes on Whip's choice which, as I said,
comes as no surprise, but the foundation for that choice has not
been properly or effectively laid. Rather than satisfy, Denzel’s
choice disappoints not because it’s not heroic but because it’s
not properly motivated. The stakes are there, but we are left to
do the director’s homework for him, adding things up in our
heads that really needed to be on the screen—the corporate
interest, the thousand-plus jobs (and thus families) at stake,
and key relationships with his son and with a stewardess whose
face lingers on-screen at Denzel’s breaking point. But we’re
sitting there trying to remember who she is. Who? Oh, that’s
right. And my mind now has to comb all the way back to the
opening of the film to remember why this person factors into
what, for too many of us, would have been an easy decision.
Consecutive Wrong Turns:
A critical sadness lurking beneath feigned indignant bravado, layers on a cake.
Don Cheadle gives Whip the bad news.
The Scary Things
Everybody loses because of Denzel’s choice, which is brilliant
writing. Hailed as a hero throughout the film, Flight
rips off a much better film, Robert Redford’s brilliant Quiz
Show, whose pivotal character ix likewise done it by
conscience, only Ralph Finnes' immaculate Charles Van Doren's
pivotal moment was brilliantly and painstakingly motivated.
Whip's nobility concerning something which had absolutely
nothing to do with the legal or practical issues surrounding the
plane crash, likely cost a thousand people their jobs. The
weight of that choice is certainly there, but the audience is
left to pick it up off of the cutting room floor and figure
these things out, just as we’re left to struggle with why Kelly
Reilly is even in the film. She serves almost no purpose and
lends suspicion that an entire subplot had been trimmed because
nothing else makes much sense. Her story goes absolutely nowhere
and plays absolutely no role in the film's climax. Likewise the
1-note performance by Whip’s son, designed I suppose to invoke
our emotions, and why the image of a flight attendant Whip was
using for fun and games and, demonstrably, little more, should
matter to the film’s climax. These abrupt misses and unanswered
questions suggest maybe at least a half-hour of missing footage
I understand and even applaud the movie Robert Zemeckis was
trying to make. The one up on the screen is deeply flawed either
because he’s asking too much of his audience or asking too
little.
Christopher J. Priest
15 November 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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