Flight (2012)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker has a problem with drugs and alcohol, though so far he's managed to complete his flights safely. His luck runs out when a disastrous mechanical malfunction sends his plane hurtling toward the ground. Whip pulls off a miraculous crash-landing that results in only six lives lost. Shaken to the core, Whip vows to get sober -- but when the crash investigation exposes his addiction, he finds himself in an even worse situation.
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Weaving along the booze-soaked trail that so many great film actors have navigated before him, Washington gives a career-defining performance, right up there with Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.
As excerpted in the film's trailer, the harrowing airplane crash sequence suggests that screenwriter John Gatins has revamped the disaster genre, but this is less an update of "Airport" than of "The Lost Weekend," plus the heavy spiritual component of such past Zemeckis films as "Cast Away" (also about a plane crash) and "Contact" (with Jodie Foster as another type of sky worker, an astronomer).
Treading similar ground to Billy Wilder’s exasperatingly cautionary The Lost Weekend (1945), in which Ray Milland plays a desperate drunk finding and hiding drops wherever he can (lamp fittings, under the coach, from the bar down the road, etc) Whitaker encounters booze everywhere.
“Flight” is not acrid or cruel, like Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” (1945), in which we see the world through the eyes of Ray Milland’s character as he suffers the d.t.s.
If you like this, try: Substance abuse classics like “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “The Lost Weekend”…
(It recalls the similarly fateful union between Nicholas Cage and Elisabeth Shue in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, still the high-water mark for drunken romantic fatalism.)
Weaving along the booze-soaked trail that so many great film actors have navigated before him, Washington gives a career-defining performance, right up there with Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.
Other celebrated films featuring memorable portrayals of booze hounds such as Harvey (1952), The Verdict (1982), Barfly (1987), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and House of Sand and Fog (2003) have richly textured drunks — though not of the highly functional kind — and almost always hover on the border of stereotype.
Nor is it soaked in the romantic poetry of self-destruction, in the manner of “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), in which Nicolas Cage, with Elisabeth Shue at his side, undergoes an extended liquid self-immolation in a hotel room.
What makes this different from genre classics like “The Lost Weekend,” “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Leaving Las Vegas” is an action-packed first act and a bravura performance by Denzel Washington.
Flight, after the amazing set-up, turns out to be a film about alcoholism and maybe redemption, ala a couple of classic films about drunks, The Lost Weekend and Leaving Las Vegas.
At heart, it’s an addiction drama in the vein of “Clean and Sober” or “The Boost,” as Whitaker retreats deeper and deeper into the bottle.
…hink of “Flight” as Michael Crichton’s book “Airframe” crossed with the Michael Keaton movie “Clean and Sober,” with some talk about God awkwardly sprinkled throughout.
Anyone who’s seen Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and countless similar dramas, knows their fairly worn-out dynamic.
What makes this different from genre classics like “The Lost Weekend,” “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Leaving Las Vegas” is an action-packed first act and a bravura performance by Denzel Washington.
That, seven miles up, lives depend on pilots sobriety and skill is not the films point of concentration, which appears more in line with that of such better considerations as The Lost Weekend, The Country Girl, Come Back, Little Sheba, Days of Wine and Roses, Long Days Journey into Night and Leaving Las Vegas.
Their relationship is Days of Wine and Roses stuff, a dramatic ballet of co-dependency and the inevitability of one person wising up before the other.
Cut from the same cloth of addiction-denial-recovery dramas (most recently “ Smashed ,” which plays like a “ Days of Wine and Roses ” for millennials), “Flight” hinges on the question of whether Whip will finally accept the reality of his disease or succumb to it.
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(Geraghty loses points during the nosedive, though, for his channeling of Bill Paxton in “Aliens.”)
The most memorable movies made by Robert Zemeckis combine old-fashioned storytelling, technical sophistication, and either elements of social satire (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit), existential musings (Contact, Cast Away) or a mixture of the two (Forrest Gump); however, the ‘technical’ stuff has overshadowed his recent work.
Robert Zemeckis hasn’t made a live-action feature since 2000’s “Cast Away,” which makes it appropriate that his return to the form, “Flight,” also involves a plane crash and grand themes of regret and reconciliation centered around a dedicated lead performance.
This is territory that movies have visited innumerable times before, and "Flight" reminds us that though he's adventurous on a technical level, Zemeckis (whose last dramatic film was "Cast Away") tends to be relentlessly mainstream in terms of drama.
After Cast Away (2000), Flight is exactly the kind of product you’d by now expect from Zemeckis: Brilliantly crafted and loaded with high-end potential at the outset but which quickly falls into a rather pedestrian tour of monumental themes.
As excerpted in the film's trailer, the harrowing airplane crash sequence suggests that screenwriter John Gatins has revamped the disaster genre, but this is less an update of "Airport" than of "The Lost Weekend," plus the heavy spiritual component of such past Zemeckis films as "Cast Away" (also about a plane crash) and "Contact" (with Jodie Foster as another type of sky worker, an astronomer).
There are so many things to like about Flight, Robert Zemeckis’ 16th feature film and his first live-action film since Cast Away in 2000.
Still, it's a solid, if unexceptional dramatic thriller about adult behvaior; minor cinema lifted up on the shoulders of one of the year's best movie star turns, and if it's not likely to stand up as a genuine classic, I can readily see it joining the ranks of The Lost Weekend and The Man with the Golden Arm in the annals of pretty much okay stories of addiction.
At heart, it’s an addiction drama in the vein of “Clean and Sober” or “The Boost,” as Whitaker retreats deeper and deeper into the bottle.
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This being Zemeckis, there are discrete moments that dazzle--not so much visually as conceptually, thus harking back to his Used Cars days.
Flight marks director Robert Zemeckis’ first foray (and second ever) into the R-rated landscape since 1980’s hilarious and underrated Used Cars .
Porn! Zemeckis’ last R-rated movie was Used Cars and what was that for, language?
(Poor Kelly Reilly, cast as the junkie who’s really sexy, plays Rosie Perez to Denzel’s Jeff Bridges, but their relationship is never persuasive like the one in Fearless .