Flying high

A carefully executed, impressively unnerving set-piece occurs early in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight: when the jet under his command suddenly undergoes cataclysmic mechanical failure, seasoned commercial airline pilot Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington) drains the fuel tanks, flips the plane upside-down and glides it into an emergency landing in a field behind a rural Georgia church. The sequence is rendered that much more suspenseful by our knowledge that Whip’s wasted: he woke that morning in an Orlando hotel with the help of some beer, a blunt, some coke and a couple of single-serve vodkas. While everyone else onboard panics, Whip keeps his cool and, as a result, saves a hundred lives; only six perish.

So an interesting question develops over the course of Flight’s first third: was Whip’s state of intoxication actually some sort of aid in his virtuoso, virtually miraculous feat of airmanship? In his resolutely cool, calm and contained performance, Washington—whose recent work has molded him into the top gun of all forms of American transportation (see Unstoppable and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3)—would seem to support this thorny theory of grace under pressure. But we know where this is going. Soon as Whip gets home from the hospital he’s flushing all the dope down the toilet and dumping all the beer down the sink (it’s mostly Corona, but still). The union hires a whip-smart Johnny Cochrane (Don Cheadle) to ensure that Whip’s Toxicology report gets dismissed from the investigation. Meanwhile, Whip hooks up with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a junkie who undergoes a nearly fatal overdose in perfect concert with Whip’s own nosedive. Nicole opts for cold turkey and AA meetings, but Whip’s resistant to join her. Stressed out by the investigation and the news groups constantly assembling outside of every building he enters, he swiftly jumps off the wagon.

The crash’s proximity to church, the omnipresent crucifixes, the lawyer’s motion to enter “Act of God” into the possible causes of the accident: Flight is taking the high, even holy, road to redemption. Screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel) builds an intriguing and morally complex story about the weird confluence of instinct, control, circumstance and body chemistry. We know that Whip’s in trouble and needs help. We also know he’s a genuine hero and was clearly not responsible for the loss of life on Flight 227; on the contrary, it’s repeated several times that no one else could have saved the lives that he did. In the film’s final third, Whip is given two tests of will. He fails one utterly and—by the moral logic of Gatins’ script—he passes the other with flying colours. But consider this: when Whip’s willpower fails, he’s sober; when, during a hearing regarding the crash, Whip finally does the ostensibly right thing, he’s drunk! And I mean, super-stinko-drunk. And high on coke. And consider this: that “right thing” that Whip does helps no one, distracts the public and industry alike from the very serious mechanical failures responsible for the crash, and essentially ruins Whip’s life. It’s a peculiar confusion of purposes: Whip’s an Icarus figure, to be punished for (literally) flying too high, yet he’s granted what is, in politically correct, 12-step program terms, a Hollywood ending. However you try to make sense of it, it’ll make you seriously consider taking the train. 

Youth gone vile: Eden Lake

They set out for the weekend to some remote locale, where the placid water snuggles up against a beach that’s good for camping. The realization, only upon arrival, that this favourite spot from years ago has since been appropriated as stomping grounds for the rowdy teenage offspring of local yokels fails to dissuade them from pursuing their romantic getaway. But Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are handsome middleclass Londoners—dare this horny young couple park their luxury Jeep and set up their tent amidst the unmistakably hostile country trash, marble-mouthed folk who don’t take kindly to outsiders, who above all look out for their own? Such actions are of course rarely advisable in horror flicks.

I rented it for the cover, which was slightly throwback in a good way, suitably gaudy, with the vague promise of atmospherics. The recent weeks haven’t yielded a whole lot of solid options for this column, so I did what I guess most people do, or at least those who still patronize video stores. With so many movies to see for work and a never-ending list of titles I’m hunting down based on my own nerdy obsessions, I don’t browse blind like I used to, but when I do I often wind up in the horror section, wondering to myself who the hell makes all these movies. In theory I love horror movies. I grew up on them. But there are so relatively few good ones, and only one way to find the genuine diamond in the rough. 

I won’t fool you. Eden Lake, the debut of British writer/director James Watkins, is no great shakes. It’s not one of these if-you-don’t-normally-go-for-horror crossover films. But it is quite interesting in its way, especially in the first third or so, and it is impressively creepy, especially in the middle, and though it does get really, really, dumb, it saves most the dumbest parts for the end, where coincidences pile up so high that this basically realistic narrative seems to be striving in vain to become boundless nightmare.

(A notable exception to the way I’ve divvied up the movie is a super-dumb moment that falls right smack-dab in the middle—and consider this a spoiler. It’s perhaps the most ludicrously bathetic scene of marriage proposal in history, with a beat-to-hell Steve sputtering on about honeymoons to India while a wound the size of an egg roll vomits little burps of blood from his side.)

Cinephiles will quickly see some or all of the bold-writ filmic precedents for Eden Lake’s narrative, and I figure they’re meant to. Before they even get into the woods to encounter the brats from hell, Steve begins to suffer a string of slights to his manhood. Jenny’s sweet about the whole thing, but really, shouldn’t he stand up to the rude hicks and impertinent punks and defend the honour of his extremely fetching female? The echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) resound loudly, and pleasingly, too, as it’s a story begging for renovation. I started to wonder if, once she inevitably assumed the role of protagonist—after all, that’s her, nubile and covered in muck, hiding behind a tree like Barbara Steele on the disc’s cover—would Jenny gradually take up the gauntlet of defender of property and bourgeois dignity in a clever gender reversal? The answer: Mmmm, sorta.

The other obvious model for this story is Deliverance (72), emphasized in the unabashedly classist depiction of rural folk as vicious xenophobes. Yet a peak sequence of sexual violation, so central to the hillbilly horror of Deliverance, and so seemingly inevitable in this equally tawdry scenario, is conspicuously absent, even when the teens actually have Jenny tied up and unconscious. Perhaps this is because Watkins sees these kids, whose leader is so completely vile, sadistic and devoid of any psychology as to be a sheer monster, as being so contaminated with violence that their hormones have actually been stunted into submission. Yet, rest assured, juvenile antics nonetheless rise to the fore, with the teens, apt and uncritical pupils of the modus operandi of Abu Ghraib, making videos with a phone of their acts of torture. This abstraction of aberrant behaviour through voyeuristic technology—and that technology’s capabilities for erasing or revising events after the fact—ultimately aligns the film, perhaps surprisingly, with either of the interchangeable versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (97/07), which shares with Eden Lake the peculiar quality of being at once truly terrifying and grotesque and silly, academic and numbing.

It’s worth pointing out that Reilly is pretty fearless. Even when the film demands that she slip at the drop of a hat to being a crazed animal hell-bent on revenge to a trembling griever for the retribution that befalls her tormentors—the film’s first scene lets us know that Jenny’s got a soft spot for kids—Reilly, who you might recognize from Mrs Henderson Presents (05) or Pride and Prejudice (05), dutifully fills out each moment with some sort of emotional logic. It’s really quite something. There should be some sort of Academy Award for valiant efforts toward salvaging the integrity of stuff like this.