Flight

When you watch commercials for the movie Flight, you see Denzel Washington flying an airliner upside down, trying to keep the airplane out of a steep dive a hoping to put the plane down with as little loss of life as possible. But [and there’s always a “but”] that’s just a small part of the story.  There’s a whole lot more to this movie than is suggested in the previews.

The story started in Orlando.  Denzel Washington got a 7:13 AM wake-up call.  He got the call, but the first person out of bed was a very attractive young lady wearing absolutely nothing.  Then Denzel got a phone call from his ex-wife.  The phone call didn’t go so well.  Denzel’s ex asks him for more money to pay for their kid’s school tuition.  They get in an argument.  Denzel hangs up.  Denzel took a drink from an almost empty beer bottle.  The young lady lit up a joint, which she shared with Denzel.  Then to top things off, Denzel did a couple of lines of cocaine to wake him up.  Did I mention Denzel had to go fly a plane in a couple of hours?  Denzel is Whip Whittaker, an airline pilot for an airline called SouthJet with a substance abuse problem.  He used to be a Navy pilot, and was reportedly a shit-hot pilot before he punched out of the Navy.

The day started off wet.  Whip did his walk around of the airplane, and then got on-board, where he was greeted by a flight attendant, who happens to be the young lady he was up all night with having sex, drinking and doing drugs.  Her name is Trina.  Her name pops up later in the story.  Margaret, the on-flight leader with whom Whit has flown many times before, also greeted him.  He made his way to the cockpit where he met his co-pilot [Ken] for the first time. Seeing Whit wearing sunglasses on such a crappy day didn’t fill Ken with very much confidence.   Whit assured Ken that he was ok to fly.  It was pouring down rain, the weather was generally crappy, but Atlanta gave them clearance to take off. 

Here’s where I call “bullshit.”  As one who flies to Atlanta a lot, I know first-hand that if there the slightest sign of rain, Atlanta halts air traffic, but I digress.  The flight took off, and  it was a very rough ride.  Whit suspended in-flight service.  He flew the plane between two storms and finally found a patch of smooth air.  Afterward, he addressed the passengers while he filled a big glass of orange juice with some small bottles of vodka. He went back to the cockpit to take a nap.  Shortly thereafter all hell broke loose.   The plane went into a steep dive, which jolted Whit from his slumber.  The only way Whit could think to stabilize the plane was to fly inverted.  He dumped fuel, stabilized the plane and rolled it back over to crash into a field.  Whit was knocked out by the crash, but he survived.

Whit woke up in the hospital.  The first person he saw was Charlie Anderson [Bruce Greenwood], a fellow pilot and now the pilot union’s representative to SouthJet.  He told Whit that most of the people survived the crash, but there were six fatalities.  Trina was one of them. After Charlie left Whit had another visitor.  This visitor is Harling Mays [John Goodman], his drug dealer.  Here is where the story goes into the classic five stages of dealing with substance abuse.

Denial.  Once he’s released from the hospital, Whit has Harling take him to his father’s farm rather than to his condo.  He wants to avoid the press, which is gathered around the condo.  Once he’s at the farm he goes through the house, finds every place he stashed bottles of booze, and empties every one of them.  I’m not sure if he thinks he can cure himself by getting rid of all his booze, or if he’s just getting rid of evidence.  While he was in the hospital he met a heroin addict named Nicole.  They both escaped their respective hospital rooms to go have a smoke in a nearby stairwell.  He saw her track marks.  They were joined by a cancer patient named Mark, who recognized Whit as “the hero pilot.”  He told her he wanted to see her again once he was released from the hospital.

Whit found Nicole’s place, right at the time she tried to skip out of paying rent.   She had nowhere to go so Whit said he could stay with her at the farm.  Nicole started to put her life together.  She got a job, went to AA meetings, and talked with her sponsor often.  She kept trying to get Whit to come to the meetings, too.   Whit finally went to one, but didn’t admit to being an alcoholic.  He left before the meeting ended.  It dawned on Nicole that by staying with Whit, her continuing sobriety was in jeopardy, so she got the hell out of there [the farm].

Anger.  Charlie Anderson tracked down Whit at the farm.  He asked Whit to have a meeting with him about the crash.  When Whit got to the meeting, he was greeted by Charlie and Hugh Lang [Don Cheadle], a lawyer from Chicago.  They informed Whit that his blood was drawn after the crash, and the results said he had elevated alcohol levels and cocaine in his system.   They said they would fight the findings, but they also told Whit that he could face jail time for manslaughter for the six people who died.  Whit didn’t take the news well and heads straight to the bar, where he orders a double vodka and orange juice. To compound things, he headed for a liquor store and stocked up on booze.

Bargaining.  At the funeral for Trina, he saw Margaret, who claimed she could tell that Whip was drunk when she first saw him that morning. Whip started to get personal, claiming that if not for him, she could have ended up dead as well.  Then he went to visit his co-pilot in the hospital.  Both Ken and his wife gave Whit the stink eye.  They informed Whit he’s got a broken pelvis, two broken legs and may never walk again.  They’re not happy with Whit.  Ken told Whit he hasn’t told the NTSB about his suspicions about Whip's condition at the time.  He told Ken the same story he told Margaret at the funeral.  Afterward, [off-camera] neither Margaret nor Ken told the NTSB their suspicions about Whit’s sobriety. 

Depression.  Whit is divorced, and neither his ex-wife nor his son want anything to do with him.  Is this the source of his drinking problem, or is his drinking problem the reason his family broke up?  He watched home movies of himself with his son and his now-deceased father, while getting hammered in the process.   I would think his inability to see his son would be depressing.  After Whit discovered the press found the farm, he turned around and headed for the neighborhood where his ex-wife and his son live.  They didn’t want him there and the ex called the cops.

More Denial.  When it came time for Whit to appear in front of the NTSB, he promised Charlie and Hugh he would stay sober.  He did that for thirteen days.  They took him to the hotel where he would meet the NTSB.  They posted a guard outside to insure he wouldn’t go anywhere.  They removed all the booze from the refrigerator.  But Whit couldn’t sleep.  He kept hearing some kind of bump in the night.  He discovered the door to the adjoining room was ajar, and made a bee line for the refrigerator, which is full of booze.  So he did what any self-denying drunk would do – he drank it all.  So the next morning when Charlie and Hugh Lang found him face down in the bathroom three sheets to the wind, they were desperate to get him together for the NTSB hearing that would take place forty-five minutes later.  Whit told them to call Harling Mays.  Harling showed up, laid out a couple of lines of cocaine, and Whit came around well enough to go to the hearing.

Acceptance.  The NTSB investigator lauded him for his flying skills.  She said that they got ten other pilots in a flight simulator to try to do what he did and they all failed.  She says the cause of the accident was a jackscrew in the elevator assembly, which made the plane go into the deep dive.  But after she praised Whip’s heroism, she questioned him about two empty vodka bottles.  The investigator knew Whit suspended the in-flight service, so the only people who would have access to the booze would be the flight attendants, pilot and co-pilot.  After she mentioned that the only person who tested positive for alcohol was Trina, Whit finally admitted he drank the vodka, and admitted that he was drunk when he flew that day, and that he was drunk at the hearing.  He ran out of lies and didn’t want to tarnish Trina’s memory.

Although he is in prison for at least five years, life is good for Whip.  He’s just finished telling his story to a bunch of other cons and is writing to Nicole, with whom he has stayed in contact.  Because he no longer feels the need to lie about his addictions, he says he’s “free.”  He’s told he has a visitor.  I thought the visitor would be Nicole, but instead it turns out to be his son.  His son tells him he has to write an essay for getting into college.  The subject – somebody I’ve never known.  Whip smiled and said “ok.”  He knew he wasn’t a father to his son because of his alcoholism, so he said “ok.”  And so the story ends… It was a somewhat happy ending.

The film could have been a depressing one, but it wasn’t.   Denzel Washington had me convinced he was on a downward spiral that wouldn’t end well for him.  This movie is just another reason he’s one of my favorite actors.