Flight

Robert Zemeckis’ first live action film in a decade is also a welcome return to an old fashioned kind of melodrama that Hollywood makes less and less these days. It is also an original script that somehow got the kind of big budgeted treatment normally doled out only for adaptations, remakes or action movies. The picture imagines what would happen if a heroic airline pilot like Capt. Chesley Sullenburger had been intoxicated on the day he performed his great feat of safely landing a severely compromised passenger plane. Flight begins strong with its pulse-quickening yet restrained crash sequence. This intriguing set up and introduction to the film's difficult main character is made all the more interesting via the parallel establishment of a key supporting role played by Kelly Reilly.

All the ancillary parts in Flight are extremely well cast, but the picture belongs to Denzel Washington. Captain Whip Whitaker provides a vehicle ideally suited to the talents of this very cool and very cold actor. Whip is the type of not-very-sympathetic-but-still-riveting-to-watch individual that very few actors can pull off; the kind of performance that Jack Nicholson could give so well in his middle-aged years. As a character study of a high-functioning alcoholic, the film transcends the “addition” genre and the “recovery” genre by using alcohol dependency as a metaphor for the kind of arrogant denial of personal problems that afflicts a great many of us. Zemeckis abandons the excessive CGI and visual showing-off that has tainted most of his live-action films as well as all his animated work. Flight is a refreshingly adult story, though not an especially complex or layered narrative and its moral conclusions leave you a bit unsatisfyed. Still, this is a worthy addition to the Oscar bait released in this early part of the season.