Robert Zemeckis' Flight, the story of an airline pilot whose heroism in the cockpit is called into question after investigators discover he was intoxicated, is a rare example of the mismarketing of a film actually paying off. Paramount sold Flight primarily as a "prestige" disaster flick, even though Flight's riveting plane crash sequence lasts only eight minutes in the movie's first half-hour. How the hell do you sell the rest of the movie, a dark addiction drama about both Denzel Washington and Kelly Reilly's struggles to get clean? You just simply don't.
Nobody really enjoys addiction dramas. The only people who enjoy them are the actors who make them and get their kicks--and occasionally, an impressive paycheck--from going Method to portray junkies or alcoholics. Addiction dramas are often such a repetitive slog, due to the addict characters' repetitive habits and relapses, while the ones that are less tedious or simply better-crafted aren't really made for repeat viewing. I admire the filmmaking on display in Requiem for a Dream, but the film's third act was so harrowing and nightmarish I'm not itching to watch it again.
Leaving out Flight's addiction footage and only hinting at it in the legal drama clips was as risky a marketing move for Paramount as emphasizing the addiction angle would have been: what if the most hardcore Denzel stans--particularly black moviegoers with conservative tastes in film (read: Tyler Perry movies) who love it when Denzel plays either a positive role model or an action hero, which, by the way, are the kinds of roles where I tend to find Denzel to be at his least compelling as an actor--come to Flight to see their hero valiantly pilot an endangered plane as advertised, but they wind up being turned off by seeing him portray such a flawed and often unsympathetic boozer for the rest of the film? And then what if they leave the theater feeling had, took, hoodwinked and bamboozled, and as a result, the word-of-mouth for Flight turns sour? Yet Paramount's odd strategy somehow worked because all of Denzel's dramatic material after the badass plane crash sequence turned out to be equally captivating anyway--his subtle, gutsy and convincing performance as alcoholic airline pilot Whip Whitaker is more worthy of a Best Actor Oscar trophy than his Oscar-winning turn in Training Day--and Flight ended up becoming a critical and financial success in 2012.
After a string of often creepy-looking motion-capture fantasy movies that divided both critics and moviegoers, Flight marked the welcome return of the craftsman behind Used Cars, Back to the Future and Cast Away to grown-up filmmaking (yes, he made the Best Picture Oscar winner Forrest Gump, but the sappy and underwhelming Gump is hardly grown-up filmmaking). I haven't watched Used Cars, Zemeckis' only R-rated film until he made Flight, but I'm aware that the 1980 cult favorite is Zemeckis at his most biting and raunchy, raunchier than what the animators attempted to get away with during much of the material involving either Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman or Betty Boop in Zemeckis' 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This mischievous side of Zemeckis from Used Cars and Roger Rabbit resurfaces in the unlikeliest of movies: Flight.
Part of what makes Flight better than the average addiction drama is the levity Zemeckis sneaks into this mostly somber piece of Denzel Oscar-bait, whether it's in the comic relief scenes where John Goodman temporarily steals the show as Harling Mays, Whip's oddly maternal drug dealer, or the opening hotel room scene where former My Name Is Earl viewers got to finally see Nadine Velazquez in all her full-frontal glory. The opening scene, which establishes Whip's alcoholism and coke habit, as well as the similar substance abuse problems of Velazquez's flight attendant character Katerina, is almost comedic in how it upends moviegoers' expectations about a typical introduction of a Denzel character and basically says, "Whip's not exactly the noble character Denzel frequently plays" (although he's played tormented alcoholics before, like in Courage Under Fire). It's even got Whip making a Bond-style pun while staring at Katerina's naked ass:
Zemeckis even sneaks in a pair of in-jokes about one of Denzel's most frequent collaborators and a past Denzel movie. I'm going to invert the following screen shot like Whip does with his plane.
Hmm, I wonder why Virtuosity isn't in that stack of videos. Anyway, another element that elevates Flight above the standard addiction drama is the movie's engaging and non-didactic legal drama side, particularly in the scenes between Denzel and Don Cheadle as Whip's efficient--and quietly frustrated, especially over Whip's behavior--lawyer, which are at times as electric as the scenes between Denzel and Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress. In Flight, Denzel and Cheadle reverse their Devil in a Blue Dress roles as, respectively, the straight arrow and the troublemaker who has to be kept in line by the former. Flight is as close to the Denzel-as-Easy/Cheadle-as-Mouse reunion movie we'll sadly never get to see due to Devil in a Blue Dress' box-office failure during the weekend of the O.J. Simpson verdict in 1995.
