I thought Flight was another hero saving the day in an enclosed moving vehicle, aka, Speed (1994) kind of movie. I was wrong. The action ends at the 30 or so minutes mark. At that time, I was still skeptical. I could not help recalling an episode of Scandal I recently saw. In that episode, a woman captain is cleared of her alleged responsibility for a flight accident by Olivia Pope’s team. That is just one of the two story lines tackled by the 45-minute episode. I wondered: would this 138-minute film virtually tell the same story? It does not, thank goodness! For the two thirds of the film, it plays with audience’s expectation of a familiar story line: how can Denzel Washington’s character clean his name in a morally ambiguous situation. The captain avoids large casualty with his unconventional maneuver while he is drunk and under influence. It is possible that even a sober captain cannot do what he did, but it is also possible that he could have saved all if he was sober. Like other audiences of film conventions, I leaned towards the former, and hoped that he could get away unpunished. When he does not go with plans to frame the drinking to a dead flight attendant, he squanders that opportunity. In other words, the worst has come to the worst. Only the film makes you realize that it is actually not the worst—you are betting on the wrong horse. What is worse than escaping doing time in prison is continuing living as an alcoholic and alienated father outside of the prison. The last 15 minutes of the film swiftly patches up a happy ending by showcasing the rewards of prison terms: new girlfriend and the son’s forgiveness. I love how the stake of the story totally changes in just one scene from quitting drinking to avoid prison to going to prison to quit drinking. And the film pulls off the sudden transition with calculated ease. If this is not screen writing at its best, I don’t what this is.
《阿甘正传》导演执导空难片
