There are so many things to like about Flight, Robert Zemeckis’ 16th feature film and his first live-action film since Cast Away in 2000.

The film is perfectly cast. My history with Zemeckis, of whose work I am a diehard fan, is that I often find his quest for perfection marred by one piece of miscasting. Not so here. There is not a misstep. Denzel, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood, and the real surprise in the mix, Kelly Reilly, who hits it out of the park… all as good as could be. And in smaller roles, Tamara Tunie, Melissa Leo, Peter Gerety, and especially Brian Geraghty… all excellent.

Zemeckis’ eye is as strong as ever, even in basic, chatty scenes. But his powers are especially obvious in – as anyone who’s ever seen an ad for this film knows is coming – the air crash sequence. Zemeckis’ work is actually pretty subtle compared to the current era of filmmaking. He is a magician, really, layering in unexpected context to extremely familiar movie moments.

And the fllm’s ambitions are really unlike any other Zemeckis film. (Quick comparisons to Cast Away or Contact strike me as bizarre.) The film that Paramount is selling isn’t the movie you’ll find on the screen. This is a movie about addiction that happens to be couched in a major air wreck and an alcoholic captain who saved many lives because when push came to shove, his instincts overcame his drunkenness. But mostly, it’s about the drunk, slowly outed by circumstance. The comparison that hit me, while watching the film – having not read the many reviews and comments already out – was The Days of Wine & Roses.

But the movie doesn’t have the emotional kick of Wine & Roses. Why?

Well, this limitation is why Flight isn’t a great movie. I had a similar problem with Shame last year around this time, though I felt that film overcame it more because the film was so clearly focused on the intimate. Flight is more accessible because of all the big studio stuff – the airplane stuff- that distracts from the core. But the emotional daring of Zemeckis’ earlier films is, for me, mostly absent here. We have the big scenes of pain and discovery. But the journey itself is a bit shallow.

The strange thing is, the screenplay seemed to want to push the envelope more than it does. I don’t know whether ideas were developed out or cut out after production. But there seemed to be things being set up that never really paid off the way they probably should have.

I don’t want to include spoilers here, but I will offer this broad stroke. When you put two broken people together, do you expect fireworks or a gentle fire followed by embers burning out quietly? When a guy pulls a Sully Sullenberger, do you expect some real hype around the guy and/or intense confrontations with the press as questions arise?

The movie smartly throws in things the audience craves from start to finish. Every time John Goodman shows up, the audience gets excited. Whenever Denzel turns into DENZEL, the audience gets excited.

The difficulty is, Denzel isn’t DENZEL for most of the movie. He’s mopey or drunk or angry without a focus or… did I say, mopey? Thing is, it’s a pretty flawless performance by Mr. Washington. I can’t fault anything he did as an actor. Some of the actions are previously unseen, but nothing by which a really fine actor like Mr. Washington seemed deeply challenged.

But in terms of the screenplay, DZ’s character, Whip Whittaker, after the crash, is an indie film character, moving for about 100 minutes from A to B (or F to G) in his personal story of fighting alcoholism. Is that reality? Sure. Maybe it’s even slower than that in real life. Trying to kick a long-standing habit in the middle of one of the most stressful events of your life is too much for virtually any human being. But dramatically, it felt, to me, like DENZEL, The Movie Star. was being protected by the filmmakers. Hovering near bottom is interesting for a while, but bottom doesn’t seem like a real bottom for someone as resourceful and skilled at both evasion and denial as Whip Whittaker.

Back to the comparison to Shame… I have friends who have gone through Sex Addiction programs, so I have some secondhand knowledge of how bad things get for people who are truly suffering a sexual addiction. I know a number of real life examples of that bottom… and more horrifyingly, the near bottom but not bottom. One of the problems with Shame finding audience interest outside of movie lovers who admired Steve McQueen’s artistry and the acting fireworks of Fassbender and Mulligan was that many people left the movie still not convinced that its anti-hero was really an addict, as opposed to a really good looking guy who likes to fuck a lot of hot women and is hung up on his sister in a weird way. For as much nudity and sex as is in that film, it was too subtle to be completely real. Serious addiction is often profoundly ugly. And when dramatized, audiences intuitively react when things are not ugly enough, if ugly is what they are offered.

I will give one example from Flight that is not a spoiler… as I won’t give the details. But at one point, Whip is confronted by one of his supporters who mentions that the police had escorted him from somewhere. We don’t see it. But more to the point, for me, is that we saw a drunk Whip pull his car up to the house from which he is later escorted. There is a fire hydrant prominently placed inches away from his front passenger side tire… and he leaves an open alcoholic beverage in the vehicle.

Now, maybe the police and likely trouble with that car was shot. Something was going on there. Zemeckis didn’t have the character park next to a hydrant and do a close up by mistake. And maybe that sequence slowed the movie down more than it helped the movie. Happens.

But that kind of confrontation never happens in the film. The only real notice of the idea that people see Whip as a hero is that we see a couple of moments of Larry King’s Replacement Live saying that it so many words. We get neither the high nor the low. Coincidence? Seems like they were worried about Whip being too unlikeable to ever recover in the eyes of the audience. Or that the film was too much of a downer. I would assume the same about Life of Pi, which has a major movie star in a single scene. Later events suggest strongly that said star had another major sequence, but that the sequence was cut to make things easier on the audience… a cop out that all but killed the movie for me.

I can invert the idea of Flight in my mind… that the events around this alcoholic continued to enable his addiction. But that movie isn’t really there either. It is hinted at occasionally. But instead of the big moment when he confronts his biggest enabler, we get a reprieve from the misery and a laugh. Loved the scene… but not in context.

It could have also been a movie about going through bottom and recovery in public. But that is really almost untouched.

So what you get is a beautifully made film with terrific acting and good lines and some really great moments and one of the great airplane sequences ever… that somehow feels like an half-empty vessel.

If there is an element that is part of the thematic quilt of Zemeckis’ career, it is the meditative nature of both Contact and Cast Away… a nature this film has for instants… but seems to be afraid to dive into fully. People who don’t like those two films seem to consistently be turned off by those parts of the films.

Of course, there are one character in the Zemeckis oeuvre who have much more connective tissue to Whip Whittaker than anyone in Contact or Cast Away. Rudy Russo, who is on the hustle from the opening frames of Used Cars to right near the very end of the film. Of course, Zemeckis’ epic second film is an out-n-out broad comedy. But there are similar bread crumbs, from the missing/dead father figure, the energy around skirting the law, a romance complicated by the anti-hero’s failings, and even a similar motivation for the ultimate moment of acceptance. The reason why Used Cars works better is that Rudy’s ambition is clear, he isn’t ambivalent about his choices, so the audience is along with him, considering his options from start to finish.

I’m not saying that I don’t love a movie that is ambiguous. I tend to prefer it. But there is a way of sitting in that soup that is counter-intuitive for a plane crash movie. That was the biggest challenge of the screenplay for Flight, which has a really interesting idea at its core. Delivering a film that was both an entertainment and a grueling emotional revelation was the hurdle that, if jumped, would have made this a truly great film. But for me, it didn’t get there. The plane crash movie – and the budget and studio money it came with – seems have gotten in the way. This is one of the movies where the audience enjoys the parts more than they feel the sum of those parts.

But I’ll be back to see it again. Mining the good parts of Zemeckis’ life-action return is enough to get me in the room again. One of the truly underappreciated greats.

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