Flight
(2012)
Robert Zemeckis’ return to live-action
filmmaking shoes up the same problems as his last couple of pre-motion capture pictures;
a tasty premise, but what do you do with it?
Flight could have been a great movie. The first thirty minutes are as good as anything in any film released in 2012. Zemeckis has commented that beginning with a huge action sequence didn’t matter, since the personal story that follows is so powerful. But the problem is, the rest of the movie only fully engages sporadically. And when it does, it’s all about courtroom theatrics; not with the character arc it’s trying to justify.
The problem, as ever, is cliché, and in
this case more particularly that of Hollywood moralism. Having set up a magnificent
anti-hero, the script by (recovering addict) John Gatins sets on a course of
sub-Leaving Las Vegas indulgence
before finding a point of redemption that everyone can get behind. This is what
mainstream movies with “edge” have come to; in order to justify the payload of
an out-of-control character, one who doesn’t conform to the status quo, he must
be rigorously punished (even at his own hand) in order to show the audience how
they should behave. Don’t trust your viewer to work out that he’s in the wrong;
have it spelled out by his own realisation. Movies used to be restricted by the
edict that the criminal couldn’t be seen to win, no matter how likeable (see The Italian Job, or The Lavender Hill Mob), but the late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw a
brief trend of trusting the audience to judge a character’s foibles and flaws for
themselves, whether the movie served up retribution and repentance or not.
Flight struggles between this impulse to credit its audience with
intelligence and another to treat them with kid gloves. It ends up flailing as
it ultimately chooses to kowtow to the mainstream of presumed acceptability.
The idea of an intoxicated pilot (Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington) who
pulls off a feat of incredible skill and then has his heroic status called into
question, is a compelling one and Gatins deserves enormous credit for it. But
where he goes wrong is making him an addict. As much as the movie appears to be
refraining from taking the moral high ground at the outset, it ends up having
to depict Whip as extremely fucked
up. How might the scenario have been more nuanced if he was just an occasional
party animal, no doubt lacking an appropriate compass as regards his
responsibilities, but not someone we could all point at as being completely out-of-control.
The midsection of the film drags us through
Whip’s states of stupor to the point of disinterest. He’s no longer an
intriguing character but a means for Denzel to show off his drunk acting. This
kind of thing quickly became a bore when Nic Cage was going off on one to Oscar
glory. No doubt, substance abuse isn’t something that the movies should extol.
But showing every abuser as inveterately doomed is a false play. Particularly
when we know Whip has been behaving like this for a good decade or more without
incident. Suddenly it has to hit home to tell us why he’s so screwed up. There
has to be a more insightful way to address such a subject than adopting polar
extremes. But few Hollywood movies have been able to tackle addiction without
hyperbole. It takes an indie picture like Drugstore
Cowboy (now getting on for a quarter of a century old) to say something
insightful about the mundanity of the lifestyle.
Flight’s intentions are worthy, but every other scene or supporting
character hits a wall of over-familiarity. Zemeckis soundtracks the movie with
every unsubtle tune he can think of (outdoing Killing them Softly), and requires his characters to indulge in
worn-out theatrics on how they either will (John Goodman’s entertaining but
only-in-movies pusher man) or won’t (Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly)
endorse Whip’s lifestyle. The performances are strong all-round, but the cast
can only do so much to undercut how rote they all are. James Badge Dale has a
memorable scene as a stairwell cancer patient, but it’s the point where the
film begins to drift into overstatement. When Denzel starts knocking back a 1.5
litre bottle of Smirnoff in his car, realisation dawns that Zemeckis mush have
insisted that a 1 litre bottle wouldn’t be enough to tell us that addiction is
bad.
Zemeckis is a technically masterful
filmmaker but, like sometime mentor Steven Spielberg, his blind spot is the
script department. Maybe he should go back to writing his own, which is where
his greatest artistic successes lay. He’s made a film that looks double the
budget it is, and it is exquisitely
crafted, but his characters hit every single obvious note imaginable. It’s not
brave to have a character continually fall of the wagon and reject offers of
help if life-affirming awareness is finally reached (the last scene is
particularly trite). Wouldn’t it be braver, or more interesting, to end at a
point where we the audience knows Whip is wrong but he is let off the hook?
That’s what a good ‘70s movie would have done.
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