Flight: A Superb Denzel Washington Keeps This Nasty Character Study Aloft

Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is not a nice guy. The first scene in Robert Zemeckis’ new feature Flight displays enough of the man’s scummy crevices to earn the viewer’s distaste. Rolling out of his hotel bed in a drunken fog two hours before he’s scheduled to pilot a Miami-to-Atlanta passenger flight, Whip swigs a warm High Life, quarrels about child support with his ex-wife on the phone, ogles the dressing flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) he’s just tumbled, and snorts a line of cocaine. Zemeckis caps this scene with Whip’s aviator-shaded strut down the hall to Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright,” providing an opening peek at Flight’s pitch-black tragicomic sensibility (and its on-the-nose, cliché-drenched playlist).

High-functioning alcoholic that he is, Whip makes his flight without trouble, squeezing in a little hotshot piloting during the ascent through a thunderstorm. Greased with three mini-bottles of vodka, the journey goes relatively smoothly until the descent into Atlanta, when suddenly multiplying mechanical malfunctions send the plane into a steep dive. Whip, exhibiting the sort of steel-nerved cool few actors but Washington can credibly convey, pulls off some jaw-dropping maneuvers and manages a miraculous crash landing that results in a mere six deaths rather than the expected 102.

This all occurs in the opening thirty or so minutes of the film, the rest of which concerns the legal and personal fallout of the crash, and in particular Whip’s erratic slide into a morass of remorse, arrogance, booze, and endless lies. Flight is, at bottom, a rather vicious character piece about addiction. Its assertion that a single feat of astonishing heroism does not redeem an out-of-control drunk might be a banal statement, but Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatis keep everything admirably off-kilter by switching between misty-eyed drama and bitter comedy on the appropriate beats.

The film’s mood of moral free-fall is assisted by a superb performance from Washington, whose megawatt presence alone creates a stomach-churning dissonance. It’s easy to develop short-term amnesia as Whip resolves to go sober (for real this time) and plays the dashing knight to a junkie maiden (Kelly Reilly). Then he’s is back to drinking (again), lying to the faces of his friends and lawyers, and menacing a flight attendant (Tamara Tunie) into amending her story to the NTSB. Oh, right: Whip is the villain.

Flight is Zemeckis’ first live-action feature after an underwhelming decade-plus foray into motion-capture animation. It’s generally a satisfying return, although the director’s most prominent contributions are handling the tonal shifts well and shrewdly tilting the entire film towards his leading man. In its worst moments, Flight traffics in the unpleasant mawkishness, clumsy caricature, and wooly religiosity that made Forrest Gump such a misfire. However, the sheer spectacle of watching a protagonist hit rock bottom over and over (and spectacularly so) and the queasy thrill of never knowing how one should feel about his possible redemption make Flight a worthy entry in the tradition of grotesque filmic character studies.