Film Review: Flight

Flight. Rated MA 15+ (strong themes, drug use and nudity). 138 minutes. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Written by John Gatins.

Verdict: A powerful, uncompromising study of the perils of addiction.

As painfully intimate, human dramas go, it is hard to imagine a more compelling recent offering than this. Combining a terrifying plane crash with the potent and destructive issues associated with alcohol and drug addiction is the masterstroke in Gatins’s (Real Steel) terrific, Oscar®-nominated screenplay. In the hands of Zemeckis (The Polar Express, Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future) and his frequent collaborators, cinematographer Don Burgess and editor Jeremiah O'Driscoll, the results are utterly engrossing.

Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is an airline pilot. He is also an alcoholic. When a disastrous mechanical failure occurs on one of his flights and he manages to avert what could have been an accident of catastrophic proportions, he is hailed as a hero. But when the hospital’s toxicology report reveals traces of alcohol and cocaine in his blood system at the time of the accident, the airline and the pilot’s union do everything within their power to avoid being held liable for the accident.

Washington is magnificent as the booze-soaked and drug-addled Whitaker, delivering a career-defining, Oscar®-nominated performance of immense range. He is brilliantly supported by Kelly Reilly (Sherlock Holmes), whose heroin-addicted Nicole meets Whitaker in hospital where they are both recovering – her from an overdose and him from the accident. This unlikely meeting leads to an extraordinary relationship between two individuals struggling to overcome their very personal addictions. This powerful, richly-layered study of the perils of addiction provides Flight with an uncompromising, rich vein of dramatic depth that is unexpectedly resolved in the penultimate scenes in front of the National Transportation Safety Board enquiry – lead with brutal efficiency by the superb Melissa Leo (The Fighter).

Under Zemeckis’s masterful direction, the stricken airliner sequences are astonishing, but we soon find ourselves in the equally-involving world of very human consequences. Consequences that, one day – even with the very best intentions of friends, loved ones, colleagues and family – may become impossible to continue to deny.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.