In “Flight,” Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), an ace airline pilot, wakes up in an Orlando hotel after a night spent with a flight attendant (Katerina Marquez), takes a swig of beer, and does a line of cocaine. We next see him getting into a cockpit and flying a plane, headed for Atlanta, through a fearsome storm and into the clear. Then, standing at the front of the plane, he reassures the passengers while he pours—one arm working behind a bulkhead—several little bottles of vodka into a quart of orange juice. Back in the cockpit, swacked, he falls asleep, only to be awakened when the plane’s tail malfunctions, sending the craft into a forty-eight-hundred-foot dive. The film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, staged a frightening plane crash in “Cast Away,” and this one, as the fuselage begins to come apart, is even more alarming. After maneuvers so strange that I would rather you disbelieve them on your own, Whip belly-flops the craft more or less safely in an empty field.
I’m letting you know that the landing is a success because that isn’t what the movie is about. “Flight”—the title has a double meaning—is devoted not to heroism but to furtiveness, to the strategy of lying, bluffing, and endless evasion which allows an intelligent and talented man to get through life as an alcoholic. Two things are clear from the beginning: no other pilot could have made that particular landing; and Whip’s condition had nothing to do with what went wrong with the plane. On the contrary, the cocaine and the booze may have given him the courage to try the daredevil stunt that saved the day. Yet Whip gets found out. Six people die in the crash, and a toxicology report, combined with the empty vodka bottles, puts him in danger of criminal charges. The National Transportation Safety Board and a lawyer hired by the pilots’ union (Don Cheadle) sort out Whip’s various sins, and, recovering from injuries, he retires temporarily to his father’s empty country house with a lost young heroin addict (Kelly Reilly) whom he meets in the hospital. At first, she seems to be in worse shape than he is. She’s not. He drinks, stops, starts again.
“Flight” is not acrid or cruel, like Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” (1945), in which we see the world through the eyes of Ray Milland’s character as he suffers the d.t.s. Nor is it soaked in the romantic poetry of self-destruction, in the manner of “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), in which Nicolas Cage, with Elisabeth Shue at his side, undergoes an extended liquid self-immolation in a hotel room. The screenwriter of “Flight,” John Gatins, apparently drawing on his own experience of bad times, has made, with Zemeckis, an earnest and vibrantly matter-of-fact film. “Flight” is intricately knowledgeable about such things as where to stash bottles and little packets of cash. It demonstrates a fine appreciation of the necessary labors of an amiable candyman (John Goodman), who shows up with dope and drink whenever Whip needs him. Zemeckis avoids any expressionistic re-creations of an alcoholic’s world. We look at Whip from the outside, clearly, even relentlessly, and the director lets his star work in extended takes, which turn out to be more revealing than an internal point of view.
Washington allows his body to go puffy and slack. His gaze is unfocussed, his walk loose and shambling, except when Whip does some coke, at which point Washington moves in a confident, swinging lope. Whip is a proud man, but Washington lets us see the narcissism and the self-pity behind the pride, a ready access to anger that gives Whip a moment of relief, as he tells people off, drawing deeper into guilt and futility. He gets drunk when he most needs to be sober. His messes are defiant, as if he thought that they were an accomplishment. The causes of his alcoholism are not examined, which is just as well—explanations of a condition so elemental and encompassing risk banality. As the film goes along, steadily, slowly, it puts us in the ambivalent position of admiring Denzel Washington’s bravery and candor and disliking the character he plays. We get tired of watching Whip fail, and we’re caught between dismayed pity and a longing to see him punished. Only a great actor could have pulled off this balancing act. I was reminded of Laurence Olivier’s bravura in “The Entertainer,” in which he plays an exhausted old vaudevillian. At a certain point, great actors want to show us the truth of something that may be far from their lives but that somehow they understand, intimately, all too well.
“Skyfall” marks the fiftieth anniversary of the mother and father of all franchises. It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but “Skyfall,” in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. “Skyfall” offers portents of the end, of the possible termination of 007 (Daniel Craig) and also of the Tennyson-quoting M. (Judi Dench); and it suggests, too, the looming irrelevance of M.I.6, which turns out to be not the powerful center of intelligence but just another station in a world of infinitely hackable networks. The Bond movies offered the exhilarating freedom of travel—James caressed by soft breezes and swaying palms—but distance is now meaningless. Evil may erupt wherever there’s a computer. It’s certainly no longer confined to a place, like China or Russia or an underground redoubt or a tropical island, where an unspeakably malevolent genius with precise diction threatens to take over the world.
The enemy this time is no more than a former M.I.6 agent, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a giggling blond creep who reveals the names of other agents and caresses Bond’s knees (the two acts of aggression are treated as equals). Appearance-wise, he seems intended to be a cross between Julian Assange and Andy Warhol. But Silva also harbors a grudge against M. Indeed, both Bond and Silva are obsessed with M.; Silva hates her, and Bond, in his way, loves her. They are like two quarrelling sons. The director, Sam Mendes, has taken a pop concept and solemnized it with Freud, which is not, perhaps, the best way of turning Bond into grownup entertainment. Judi Dench acts with her usual fierce concentration, and I should report that there’s a neat scamper across rooftops, this time with motorcycles, not to mention the reliable old nonsense of a car chase that manages to smash every fruit stand in the street. In terms of spectacle, the Bond franchise has long been overtaken by its rivals, and in this movie many of the action sequences, including an apparent death by drowning, seem borrowed from other recent movies (see the watery plunge in “Bourne”).
Daniel Craig is amusingly single-minded. He has the strange attractiveness—prominent nose, hooded eyes, narrowed forehead—of an intelligent cobra. He’s dry, a little grudging, even, with only the flicker of a smile and no discernible soul. Of course, he doesn’t need a soul. What would be the bloody use of it?, as M. might say. Just as he is, he’s sufficient for his job, his body a frequently unsheathed weapon, alabastered and fast, cutting through cluttered sets and straitened passageways.
Looking back over the half century of films, however, I still long for Sean Connery. Connery was shrewd and piratical—he let us in on the fun of being wicked. An ironist, he knew that the role was absurd but that the desire for fantasy wasn’t. He was the gentleman-rogue hero—aristocratic in disdain, yet classless—of every man’s dream of himself, and women could enjoy him as the adroit cad who arrives at night, delivers the goods, and leaves in the morning. Connery took his time. His drawling pauses as he calculated his advantage were a prime comic device, the manner of a brute swathed in sophistication, so sure of success that he never needed to rush.
Roger Moore, of course, was more Brut than brute. He gave off the aura of a luxury product in an airline magazine—an expensive leather case, perhaps, rubbed rather too often with oil. He was neither shaken nor stirred; he was smooth, unmarked by experience in any way. George Lazenby and the gracious Timothy Dalton never really took control of the role, but Pierce Brosnan, with his big, handsome head atop a slender body, could be flinty. He had an interesting mean streak and the habits of cold indifference. He was lithe and quick, yet not really a menace, like the big-bodied Connery or the steel-springed Craig.
The earlier Bonds were superlative lovers of food, spirits, and women. As box-office has become truly internationalized, however, the producers may have feared that a too knowing Bond might not please everyone. Such a connoisseur could turn off moviegoers who object to the notion of being outclassed. The Bond franchise will continue, though I doubt we shall ever again hear Bond say, as Connery did in “Goldfinger,” that a certain brandy was a “thirty-year-old fins indifferently blended, sir, with an overdose of bons bois.” I don’t know what bons bois is, but I enjoyed the astringent flavor of Connery’s judgment. ♦
