Flight

Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Capt. ‘Whip’ Whit­aker in Flight is that of a thoroughly gifted airline pilot, but one who has nothing else going for him in life. He is a functioning alcoholic, one whose way of coping with a brutal hangover is to snort a line of cocaine. ‘Flight’ begins with Whip waking up in a hotel room with a beautiful (and very naked) young woman, who is an attendant on the flight he is piloting from Florida to Georgia in 90 minutes. He’s seriously hung over, snorts his coke, gets in a fight on the phone with his ex-wife, and then goes to work, where you would not know that there is anything wrong.

Once the plane is in the air, things start to go wrong. They are flying in extreme turbulence, and the plane is being tossed around. He figures out an unconventional way to get the airplane up and out of the storm, and the passengers cheer when they find themselves in relative calm and blue skies. Whip leaves the plane in the capable hands of his co-pilot, goes out front to say hello to the passengers, and pours himself a stiff drink. Then he goes back into the cockpit, and takes a nap. He is awoken by something going very wrong with the airplane, which is now pointed nose down, straight for Earth. If the scene of extreme turbulence doesn’t turn you off of flying, the scene where Whip has to figure out how to get the plane safely to the ground will have you thinking, “3,000 mile trip? No thanks, I’ll walk.” It’s harrowing.
This is perhaps the first 20 minutes of the film. The other 2 hours are Whip drinking, drinking, and then drinking some more. He is being investigated for his role in the accident, toxicology reports have shown his drinking and cocaine use, and yet, he is a hero in the media.

Washington was pretty amazing in this film. It’s easy to picture him as the competent, cool headed pilot who can accomplish anything. It’s more difficult to picture him as a middle aged man with an eye for beautiful, much younger, women, with a drinking problem that threatens to destroy him. In the end, it is a moral tale of a complicated man coming to terms with himself.

I liked it a lot. It was engaging and interesting, and I didn’t know who to root for. I didn’t want Whip to be persecuted…it was his skills in the air that saved so many lives. Most pilots could not have landed that airplane stone cold sober. And at the same time, seeing him chug vodka while in the drivers seat was enough to make the audience feel that seeing him put behind bars might not be the worst thing in the world.