Flight

In Robert Zemeckis’ stirring addiction drama “Flight,” Denzel Washington plays a drunk so convincingly — and so authentically — that you’ll find yourself suspecting he sneaked a glass or two of bourbon before the shooting of each scene. The trick, he says, is feigning sobriety. "Where actors get into problems is that they act drunk," he told USA Today. “In fact, you're trying to keep it in.” This is evident not just in Washington’s remarkable performance — his meatiest and most emotionally complex since “Training Day” in 2001 — but also in his character, a man so used to keeping it in he’s convinced himself that there is nothing to keep in.

He is William “Whip” Whitaker, an ace commercial airline pilot and long-time alcoholic-in-denial whose smooth charisma and masterful skills in the art of deception have allowed to him to be a substance abuser for years unnoticed. His antics have, however, lost him his wife and the respect of his teenage son, who now live together in the suburbs of Atlanta. We are introduced to Whitaker as he awakens in an Orlando hotel room following an all-night party with stewardess Katerina (Nadine Velazquez, “My Name is Earl”). Groggy and red-eyed, he starts this fateful workday swigging back stale beer, smoking a spliff and perking himself up by snorting a line of cocaine. “It helps straighten me out” he later explains.

This opening, in which we are presented with a full view of Miss Velazquez’s disrobed physique, is crucial in establishing both Whitaker’s condition and that Zemeckis has returned to the realms of adult filmmaking as well as the medium of live-action. After 10 years of playing with motion-capture suits in computer-animated fantasy spectacles “The Polar Express,” “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol,” Zemeckis is helming his most adult feature yet, a film much more interested in honest, harrowing human drama than whiz-bang special effects.

But there is one sequence in “Flight” that is truly spectacular, coming twenty minutes into the runtime as Whitaker mans a malfunctioning aircraft, still drunk from the previous night. The build-up is a masterclass in suspense: arriving late to the plane with a hangover, Whitaker rouses himself by breathing in a lungful of pure oxygen, tames his throbbing headache with a vodka-spiked cup of orange juice and an aspirin, and proceeds to fly the jet at full speed through bone-rattling turbulence. Soon after, he takes a nap in the cockpit, leaving his rookie co-pilot (Brian Geraghty, “The Hurt Locker”) to take over, and awakens to find the plane in an uncontrollable dive.

The next ten minutes are terrifying in their viscerality and comparable in their raw, disastrous terror to the early tsunami sequence in Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Impossible.” As the plane hurtles down a 4,800 ft drop, Whitaker bravely takes control of the situation, relaxing his co-pilot and calmly giving orders. In a moment of unblinking genius, he “rolls” the plane, turning it upside down in a desperate attempt to stop the dive and achieve stability — a ground-level shot of the jet flying overhead belly-up is a glorious sight.

The plane miraculously lands right-side-up in an empty Atlanta field. 96 out of a possible 102 lives are saved, and Whitaker — like the pilot who successfully landed a malfunctioning US Airways plane into the Hudson River in 2009 — is hailed as a hero by the media. Not wanting the fame, Whitaker secretly retreats to his late father’s rural farmhouse while the news cools down, planning to give up drinking once and for all. But his bad habits are fast to return and come back to bite him in the ass when a toxicology report proves he had alcohol and cocaine in his system on the day of the flight, meaning this Star Spangled hero may go to jail on charges of manslaughter.

A key question in the film is whether Whitaker succeeded in landing the plane despite his intoxication or because of it — being stoned may have been what gave him the courage to attempt such a feat. Whitaker is stubborn that it was the plane’s fault for “falling apart” and that his inebriation played little to no part in the disaster itself. Lead investigator for the NTSB Ellen Block (Melissa Leo, “The Fighter”) is adamant that his inebriation played a vital part, and that a little jail time is what he deserves.

The film itself, it remains advisedly ambiguous on the subject, but looks upon Whitaker with deep sadness as he spirals further and further into a self-made Hell of drink, drugs and depression. Washington, whose brave and tortured performance has rightly earned him an Oscar nomination, at no point begs for sympathy but earns it through his natural gravitas and the knowledge that Whitaker is his own worst enemy: here is a man who stumbles along a fine line between pride and self-pity, who has a crippling weakness that, like so many alcoholics, he fails to recognise and refuses to deal with.

By Whitaker’s side are old friend and pilots’ union representative Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood, “Star Trek”) and brilliant attorney Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle, “Iron Man 2“), who defiantly build Whitaker’s case even as his drinking continues and worsens. Nicole (Kelly Reilly, “Sherlock Holmes”) is a recovering heroin addict and troubled soul with whom Whitaker falls in love and whose attempts at helping Whitaker are met with anger. And John Goodman, seemingly channelling his comically unhinged performance in “The Big Lebowski,” is Whitaker’s boisterous drug dealer, whose services are required when Whitaker sets off on one booze-a-thon too far — two lines of coke sure can straighten a man out.

God is mentioned many times throughout “Flight,” in passing, directly and when one spiritually minded character asserts it was God who landed the plane, not Whitaker — it can’t be a coincidence that it landed by a church as a baptism was taking place in the backyard. Preachy though it may be, it shines a light on the path Whitaker is to take, a path that takes him from mindless self-destruction to acceptance and then redemption. It’s the sign of a great director — and indeed a great leading man — when he can keep us gripped with a story when we already know its outcome. In “Flight,” I wasn’t just gripped; I was drunk on its power.

8/10