Flight
**½ out of ****
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Denzel Washington, Kelly Reilly, Don
Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and John Goodman
Running time: 138 minutes
Smashed
*** out of ****
Directed by: James Ponsoldt
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul,
Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally and Octavia Spencer
Running time: 83 minutes
Two new films focus on alcoholics and the
turbulent highs and lows they encounter when dealing with their addiction. The
first is Flight, which stars Denzel
Washington as a coke-snorting, vodka-guzzling airline pilot whose substance
abuse comes under the microscope after he makes a miraculous crash landing. The second is Smashed,
a Sundance sensation featuring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as an oft-hungover
schoolteacher who decides to sober up.
Both films are anchored by strong leading
performances by the aforementioned players. However, while the former feature
is nearly an hour longer, it is the latter film that examines how one dances
with the demons of the drink with greater insight and poignancy.
In Smashed,
Winstead plays Kate, a sunny face going through some cloudy moments. She is a
schoolteacher but shows up to class hungover. As she instructs her second
graders in an early scene, she vomits. When the students probe her sudden
throwing up, Kate lies and tells them that she is pregnant.
Kate goes on many nights out of with her husband, Charlie (Breaking Bad’s
Aaron Paul), but does not always arrive home when the night is done. After
waking up in one unfamiliar place too many after drinking heavily, she takes up an offer from a
co-worker, Dave (Nick Offerman), to attend an AA Meeting.
Smashed
focuses on Kate as she faces her irresponsible behaviour and tries to remedy
herself by going down a road to sobriety. Her decision to go “cold turkey”
flummoxes Charlie, who no longer has a compadre for his good times.
Their relationship reaches a front when Charlie
starts seeing her resolve as a deterrent to their marriage. She is as much a
drinking partner to him as a life partner. Instead of helping her on the road
to recovery, he actually promotes for a harmless (i.e. harmful) drink every so
often. Paul and Winstead have a scolding chemistry that gets cooler as their
relationship becomes more imbalanced.
James Ponsoldt’s slender film, shot for
$500,000 and which won an award at Sundance earlier this year, uses Kate’s positive steps as a way to raise conflict between the determined protagonist and the
flawed habits of her family, including her embittered mother (Mary Kay Place).
Winstead gives a brave performance that yields
greater depth as she finds out that the demons she is embattling are more often the people
in her life than the mixed drink in her flask. Unlike the immature,
unperceptive drunkards that can populate other character studies, her arc from
carefree to controlled to various stages in between is gripping, the
transitions from state to state always believable. As a bruised soul straining
to complete herself even as those around her reject her sensibilities, Winstead
is riveting and affecting.
The indie film takes the lead over the
Hollywood production when it comes to examining how people move toward
sobriety. The title to Robert Zemeckis’ latest does not merely enforce how
Washington’s character, Whip Whitaker, is a pilot, but how he decides to flee
(not fight) his addiction to booze. Flight uses
the turbulent flight near the start as a metaphor for the protagonist’s
free-falling descent.
The film is a daring venture
that earns its 18A rating by showing explicit drug and alcohol abuse and
refusing to cover up female nudity. The opening scene alone is somewhat startling, as Whitaker curses, drinks and takes a snort of
cocaine while a naked stewardess walks around his hotel room. However, while
the content is harrowing, the film’s handling of addiction is slight.
Cpt. Whitaker drinks vodkas
and takes a whiff of oxygen on a bumpy flight to Atlanta that also has poor
visibility. As the plane descends, it loses control and spirals into a
roller-coaster dive. As the lives of his 102 passengers are in peril, Whitaker
is calm and collected.
This opening section culminates
in that virtuoso crash sequence, when Whitaker flips the plane upside down to
level it off before making a bumpy landing in a Georgian field. Although
initial news reports crown him as a public hero, Whitaker does his best to
avoid the limelight, knowing that attention drawn to him will eventually bring his addiction to light.
Flight has the outlines of a gripping character study in place, and the crash sequence is a virtuoso, perfectly paced, grip-the-armrests feat of direction. Nevertheless, despite its strong opening
third, the film does not go far enough in exploring the nuances of how
Whitaker’s alcoholism damages his psychology, or even how his drinking affects
other people in his life.
Whitaker strikes up a small
friendship with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a heroin addict who is trying to sort
own her own problems. The film treats the duo as more of a romantic couple than
mutual support system. Thus, there is little traction in their relationship. Nicole is even abandoned in the film's final third.
Whitaker is a mostly
irreconcilable character with a God complex and is a tough soul to
root for given the lack of dimensions given to the character. Few actors in
Hollywood are so consistently hypnotic playing characters with dark motives or
temptations, but Washington gives a defiant performance in an underwritten film
(the screenplay comes courtesy of Real Steel's John Gatins).
Flight is
138 minutes long, but despite its length, is strained by its lack of momentum
in regard to character development. The end of the film,
meanwhile, is too clean for such raw material, and makes too many easy,
undeserved shortcuts to reach its sentimental and unsatisfying conclusion.
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