FLIGHT

My, how times and attitudes change. In 1992, Denzel Washington declined to co-star with Michelle Pfeiffer in Love Field because he didn’t think his Afro-American fans would like to see him in bed with a white woman.

His latest film, Flight, opens with him in bed with a white, Hispanic woman. And later on, perhaps to prove that what might have been true in 1992 no longer applies, he beds another, Celtic, one.

But the choice of bedmate is not the only interesting aspect of the opening of Flight. Washington also drinks beer, snorts coke, then puts on his uniform and goes off to pilot an airliner from Florida to Georgia, fixing his hangover once aboard with oxygen and a few slugs of vodka. At this point you thank God you’re not sitting in the back of that plane.

What happens next in Robert Zemeckis’s film is terrifyingly well done. The aircraft hits turbulence, the tail flaps fail, and disaster threatens until a revived Washington takes control, flips the plane into a 360 degree spin and crash-lands with a minimum loss of life.

This, we are told later, is something very few pilots in the world could have done. So Washington is a hero, right?

Well, yes, except that there’s the matter of all that booze and coke. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t really have been riding a bike, let alone flying a plane.

Nothing in the rest of the film is as spectacular as the events leading up to the crash-landing, but it grips nevertheless. For the questions now are whether Washington will get away with it and whether we want him to.

This is an arrogant man, divorced and estranged from his son. He is in denial about his addiction and believes in his own superiority to others, an amoral man in an amoral world. As a hearing before the National Transport Safety Board looms, the airline pilots’ union and Washington’s employers want him cleared – whether guilty or not – for fear that any other verdict would taint the reputation of the entire profession.

They seek to blame the crash on the plane’s manufacturers and try to discredit the results of the apparently damning blood tests that Washington has been obliged to undergo.

While this plotting unfolds, Washington, treated in hospital for minor injuries sustained in the crash, has met and begun a relationship with a recovering addict, Kelly Reilly, and, ignoring her attempts to help him, carries on meeting his dealer, a splendidly jovial John Goodman.

The film could have done with a fair bit of tightening up (nearly all movies are too long these days) but it still holds the attention, largely because of Washington.

He is, and has long been, one of the finest screen actors around and here, in perhaps the most unsympathetic role he has played, he gives a superb performance, probably his best yet.

But if you ever see him boarding a plane in a pilot’s uniform – get off.