Come fly with me / Come fly / Come fly away

In case you didn’t know alcoholism was a destructive disease, here, let me crash a plane to prove a point. It’s like curing cancer by lighting a hospital on fire — complete and total overkill, not to mention pointless.

What’s tremendously frustrating about Flight is the high-volume of stellar performances within it. Consider Denzel Washington, destructive and sympathetic as the seasoned drunk ravaged by lies, cover-ups and self-deception. He lets alcohol bring him down, and then cocaine bring him back up. Oddly enough, it’s a symbiotic balance. He’s joined by big stars (John Goodman, Don Cheadle) and small ones (Kelly Reilly) as he fights to convince himself he has no problem, even as a crashed plane sits in a field smoldering.

Washington is Whip Whitaker — fantastic comic-book name! — a veteran airline pilot who functions better drunk and high than he does clean and sober. He gets on a plane and immediately raids the beverage cart for those tiny little single-serving bottles. He could blow three times the legal limit, but Whip holds it together even as his plane with 102 souls on board begins to break apart. This sequence is absolutely terrifying, unrivaled by anything before it, including that horrible plane crash from Knowing or that excruciating airborne torture in United 93. It’s made more thrilling by what seems like real aviation theory: to save a plane from a steep nose-diving descent, Whip inverts the plane until he can trim his speed and find a suitable field for a crash landing. Such maneuvers might not be possible in a commercial jet, but Flight makes it feel believable.

Officials are blunt about Whip’s abilities: not a single pilot in a flight simulator could replicate the life-saving outcome of his unorthodox maneuver. “You saved a lot of lives today,” a transportation official tells him. Whip finds out later they tested his blood after he was knocked unconscious in the crash. Of course, they’re going to find alcohol and traces of marijuana and cocaine. Should he panic, or just play it cool? He dodges the media and other questions by hiding out at his father’s property, where he wages an inner battle with himself to quit alcohol cold turkey. On an upswing, Whip empties all the bottles and cans into the sink, but a liquor store down the way tempts him further.

Washington as a miserable and volatile drunk is a fascinating performance, far removed from even his excellent dirty-cop role from his Oscar-winning turn in Training Day. He has this uncanny ability to generate immense sympathy for his characters during their perpetual implosions. A sweet old lady sitting next to me in my screening kept whispering “don’t do it” as Whip reached for vodka bottles, 24-packs of beer and a candy-like display of color inside a hotel mini-bar. Washington is a likeable guy, and to see his character struggle is one of the reasons why he was cast in this role — because we want him to succeed and it hurts to see him fail. He’s joined in many scenes by Kelly Reilly, who plays an addict who has already hit bottom, compared to Whip who is still on the downward spiral. I liked their interactions together; they’re the same characters at different points in their trajectories.

Where Flight struggles is with its many themes, which are so muddled that I failed to grasp the film’s true intention. Several times it invokes God as part of the plot: the plane crashes into a church, an evangelical church group rescues some of the passengers, the co-pilot and his wife are devout believers who believe God guided the plane to the ground and at one point Whip asks, “Whose God would do this?” In an earlier scene, in a lengthy monologue, a cancer patient questions why God would give him such a horrible disease. These scenes, exploratory in nature, seem disjointed and dangle off the rest of the plot. I kept waiting for them to link up with the spiritual aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous, but they never did.

By the end of the film, religion and God really have nothing to do with anything. All the divine clues from the beginning of the picture were woeful attempts at misdirection. Really, all Flight is about is how far a person would go to hide their alcoholism. Smashed, a smaller, more intimate movie about the exact same thing, went much further and in much more interesting ways. And it didn’t need to crash a jet to do it. (Go see it, it’s still in theaters.)

I wanted the film to focus more on this idea of frauds, which it only vaguely hints at. Whip is an American hero after he guides the plane to the ground, but he hides a devastating secret — that he was drunk and high during the crash. At any moment the incriminating facade could crash down and reveal who he really is. It could be the story of author James Frey, or accused dopers Barry Bonds or Lance Armstrong. That premise of stolen heroics is more interesting than anything else suggested in Flight — other than the performances — though it’s the most downplayed themes.

The movie is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who’s been wandering Uncanny Valley for the last 12 years doing questionable motion-capture pictures. His action is stunning and utterly convincing, but everything else wanders with little direction. At one point he films a scene on the set of a porn movie, with nude actors in the foreground and background, though the scene serves no purpose. Other times, he just resorts to trite moralizing and cliché, like during a drug scene when Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” is playing on the soundtrack. Really?! Were the rights to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” not available? Zemeckis’ perception on R-rated drama — his last 13 films have been PG-13 or milder — is just a little askew and much of it feels like pandering to adults who know better.

Flight is marvelously acted, and those airplane sequences look incredible, but all its big pieces don’t line up in any coherent fashion. It’s as if the cabin, fuselage and tail were made from three different kinds of planes. It’ll fly, but it’s not very aerodynamic.