Flight flipped around how I thought of
addiction. There have been precious few films, that I’ve seen, that are able to
speak in the language of humanity. Films normally seem strange or robotic to
me. They blast this “fill-in-the-blank” style of adlib emotion. A man’s whole
family is killed, he feels a sadness that is relatable. It’s emotion without
breadth or depth. We relate to it but
fill in the (noticeable) gaps with our own experience to make it work. It
functions more like a check. Like when meeting someone new, unless there is
instant chemistry, the discussion is crude. General topics or events are
swapped, our ratings (sad, crazy, cool) and emotional response are matched, but
it’s all a way of saying “I’m a normal person, how about you?”.* That’s
authenticating, not talking.
Prior
to Flight I thought of addicts as
weak people. They had the potential to be great but constantly, and needlessly,
fucked up. Think of Christian Bale in The
Fighter. He was so fragile mentally and physically. The world was littered
with all sorts of triggers that would lead to him having another colossal fuck
up. Flight showed me how powerful it
really is to manage. To live a life
fairly close to normal but deal with a staggering addiction at the same time.
Addicts from The Fighter’s view are like
people who can’t swim and are put in the middle of the ocean while everyone
else just watches from land. Pity is my strongest emotional response, how I relate
to them. In Flight, addicts are like
heroes of Greek Myth. They’re doing all the same things the normal people do,
but with a giant bolder chained to them. It’s awe-inspiring. My thinking
shifted from “just put them out of their misery” to “how amazing would they be
with no bolder?”.* Addicts seem like stronger people. Stronger people with
bigger weaknesses.
The
role of normal (everyone not an addict) people gets shifted as well. Fighter’s normals were unlucky but
incredibly generous people. They behave and function like blameless parents.
Sure, typically the caregivers try to shoulder some of the responsibility in
another heroic display of affection but the audience never buys that.
Everything wrong in contained, neatly, within the addict. Flight, with their superpeople addicts, tears down that
condescending wall. What makes non-addicts so good? Did you not feel that
co-pilot’s (Brian Geraghty) wife (Bethany Anne Lind) had some very serious
issues? With each normal person Denzel met I felt the take-away message was
“who you calling crazy? who you think is weak? You’re lucky courts and lawyers
don’t recognize what you do as an illness”. Normal wasn’t “normal”, those
people were just undiagnosed. Or maybe managing better. Hiding whatever quirks
they had.
It was
a line of questioning Denzel kept coming back to. Even though the plane had
faulty parts, fell apart on him, and even though he miraculously landed it
anyway, the only thing everyone else was hearing and seeing was that he was
drunk. His weakness broke the plane and God was the one who saved it. Addicts
couldn’t do anything right, only varying degrees of wrong. I never felt that
the search for the plane’s problem was an escape route for Denzel. It was more “what’s
the bigger prolem?”.* I think Flight
moved away from the Freudian notion that all character is built in childhood
too, which is more satisfying, and allows addicts to be adults not just big
malfunctioning kids. Flight replaced
the linear equation so often used as a metric in real life with a grayscale. It
never hid or emphasized one aspect over another, just asked you to form an
opinion based on the total character.
Too
many films corroborate our feelings or thoughts. They work so long and hard to
authenticate themselves only. Flight
effortlessly spoke with true humanity, carrying it so comfortably it could move
beyond and challenge anyone watching to really understand their own notions
about it. An absolutely beautiful piece or art.
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