Washington carries ‘Flight’

by ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

Whip Whitaker had an epic layover in Orlando — an all-nighter with a sexy stewardess and much imbibing. A little sniff-sniff bump to get him going in the morning? It just gets the day going.

He puts on his uniform and shows up for work. He’s an airline pilot. Maybe a couple of bottles of the plane’s mini-vodkas to take the edge off the edge? Why not?

He dozes off in the cockpit, brushes off the “You feeling OK, captain?” questions from the co-pilot. He’s an accident waiting to happen.

But when it does, nobody is cooler under pressure than Whip, given an aged, icy competence by Denzel Washington. He gets a doomed jetliner on the ground near Whip’s hometown of Atlanta with minimal loss of life. He’s a hero, right? Except for all that earlier stuff.

“Flight” is a terrific thriller about that crash, detailed to the nth degree, and a moving drama about “that earlier stuff.” Because what do you do with a case like this, a self-destructive alcoholic whose condition may have contributed to a tragedy, or mostly averted it?

Washington gives one of the great performances of his career in this fence-sitter of a film. “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, returning from the “Polar Express”/“Mars Needs Moms” toy store of motion-caption animation, and screenwriter John Gatins (“Coach Carter”) serve up a morally ambiguous morality tale that dares to suggest that maybe this guy’s condition was a good thing, in this case.

And it’s that rare movie that slaps the imprimatur of comic-cosmic cool on a drug dealer. John Goodman’s drinking-and-driving, pony-tailed swagger as Harling, Whip’s candy man, is hilarious and, dare I say it, heroic. He’s the first guy to visit Whip in the hospital, the first to offer “help,” the first with words of praise.

But Whip has dodged a bullet. Maybe he’s ready to get straight. But not without a little rationalizing.

“Without me up there, there would have been 102 funerals, and not six.”