Dead souls

Flight

Crit

Whip Whitaker gives a whole new meaning to "high-functioning alcoholic": strapping into the captain's seat for a short hop from Orlando to Atlanta still drunk from the previous night, a condition he has self-medicated with a line or three of cocaine, and later tossing back two airline bottles of vodka after an initial bit of aeronautical derring-do to find a crease of calm weather amid a storm, Whitaker suddenly has the plane go rogue on him but manages a miraculous landing that saves 98 of the 104 people on board. (A presumably realistic note that I never knew before: flight-biz people, when aggregating passengers with crew, use the term "souls" to count all the lives in the pilot's hands, a disconcerting bit of metaphysics.)

This is how it happened: we see for ourselves that despite his presumptive impairment, Whitaker does everything that a sober pilot could possibly do, plus he does more, 'cause he's Denzel, goddammit! We know from the testimony of others who know a lot more about it than we do--and by a simulator reenactment with a dozen experienced pilots, all of whom go 0 for 104 in soul-saving--that what he has done is off-the-charts spectacular. So he's a hero, but all crashes must be investigated, and the blood taken from him while he's unconscious has a tale to tell: .24% alcohol, triple-drunk per most states' highway laws.

So the film morphs from a great 15-minute fx action flick into one that plumbs moral, ethical, and logical issues: which facts will drive the investigation, and which facts should? And which impulses and ambitions will drive the life of a man who has already lost a wife and gone a long way toward losing a son to the bottle and the powder, who has lost something like a love to the crash, and who finds another something like a love, who is herself trying to quit being a junkie? And but for a sappy, tacked-on envoi, those issues are allowed free play, spared easy answers. Yet another (yawn!) great performance from Washington, and one of the best things Robert Zemeckis has given us. And, from John Goodman's Harling Mays ("I'm on the list"), the best ad hoc ride to the rescue since Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe helped Vincent and Jules deal with the Bonnie situation.