Flight snuck up on me. I have been wanting to see this movie for awhile, but the trailers do not do the movie justice. What seems like it will be a fairly good courtroom investigation movie, turns out to be a pretty darn good movie about the issues of alcoholism.
Denzel Washington plays airlines captain Whip Whittaker, who spends a long night of boozing and drugging with one of the flight attendants. With little sleep, and using cocaine to wake up, he pilots a flight from Orlando to Atlanta in bad weather. The airline suffers a mechanical malfunction and begins a nose dive. Whip brings the plane down safely, more or less, by rolling the plane to arrest he dive and glides it into a field. During the investigation, it is found out he was intoxicated and he will have to appear in an NTSB hearing with the probability he would go to jail for criminal negligence. We follow him around for most of the movie as he struggles with his alcoholism and the damage it has left in the wake of his life.
As I said earlier, the movie is advertised as a courtroom investigation movie, but it is really about the damage alcohol can do to someone. It is also about the people who try to help and the enablers who abet the alcoholic along the way. The movie is like Leaving Las Vegas meets Clean and Sober. It points out that hard-core alcoholics rarely become that way on their own; but others, especially "friends," enable them with their aid or silence. It also shows the damage that alcoholism can do to people's lives and those around them. We see that Whip is estranged from his divorced wife and son. After the crash, he meets a woman in the hospital who was a junkie who OD'ed. She takes us through the present as she tries to help him and he pushes her away. While the movie is not as dramatic as Clean And Sober or contains as much pathos as Leaving Las Vegas, it is still quite good and worth a look, particularly since it is not quite the story as advertised. My only complaint is that the end is a little too Hollywood-ish with an unforeseen change of heart during the hearing and wraps up a tad too neatly. However, this is a movie that is supposed to entertain, so there has to be some crowd-pleaser in it somewhere. Denzel is amazing as ever, with a welcome understated performance compared to his usual bombastic portrayals.
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