Flight

This film was interesting. To me, it wasn't as good as the reviews made it out to be, but it is certainly an excellent film in many respects.
Captain Whip Whitaker (a great Denzel Washington, playing a character that is a hero, but you still can't admire him) is a pilot, and a secret alcoholic, something he can't admit to himself until the final minutes of the film, but something the viewer realizes early on. He also is sleeping with one of his flight attendants, Trina (Nadine Velazquez), and to hide his painful addiction, he snorts cocaine. Whip is falling apart, but he hides everything so well and he seems able to do his job, after all he does fly the plane through some crazy turbulence in the horrible storm as the plane takes off, much to the dismay of his co-pilot, Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty). Then, while talking to the people, slips three small vodka   bottles into his orange juice and then goes to sleep for a little while.
Next, things take a turn for the worse when the plane literally starts falling apart, and Whip gets serious. He does everything he can to stop the plane from crashing including turning it over and gliding to a place without people. And the plane lands, albeit in pieces and Whip loses consciousness. He is taken to a local hospital with basically everyone else on the plane. Six people did die, including two flight attendants, one of them was Trina.
His friend Harlan (John Goodman, great, though weird as Whip's cocaine dealer) arrives but Whip, for a time being, decides to stop drinking. But that changes after the union president and Whip's longtime friend, Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood) and the lawyer he hired for him, Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle) tell him that he was drunk and high on cocaine when the plane crashed and that he spend the rest of his life in prison.
While he is still at the hospital, he meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly, excellent) who is an addict like him. They develop a romantic relationship, as she loves the farm that used to belong his grandfather. However, Nicole, who did nearly just die, is trying to recover and she wants Whip to recover with her, but after she comes back from an AA meeting, she finds him drunk and high and she leaves the following morning. She's out of his life.
In the meantime, Whip has a nasty run-in with his ex-wife and their son, but then he does get sober, only to have it all ruined the night before he faces an interview with the NRSB investigator, Ellen Block (Melissa Leo, disturbingly chilling and professional). Though his hotel room is stocked with non-alcoholic drinks, the door to the adjoining suite is accidentally left open. Here, he opens the fridge to find it stuffed with alcohol. He opens a bottle and sniffs in and then leaves on top of the fridge, and started to walk away and then grabbed the bottle, causing me to jump. That next morning, both rooms are completely trashed and Whip, is completely passed out, But that's nothing some cocaine can't cure.
During the testimony, all Whip has to do is lie, and he tells Hugh not to tell him how to lie, he's been doing it all his life to cover up his drinking. He just has to tell the crowd that the vodka bottles found in the plane's trash were from Trina, but as he looks at her picture, he can't implicate her in his mistake. She died after buckling in a little boy who had fallen out of his seat. He can finally admit that he's an alcoholic.
He goes to jail and finally gets sober. He may be in jail, but he feels free for the first time.
The problem I had this film was it's opinion of God. When Whip goes to visit his co-pilot, he tells him that he thought that Whip was drunk from the moment he walked into the cockpit. His wife also looks at him suspiciously. Though they may blame him, they quickly change their tune when they say that it was truly a miracle that he landed the plane and they ask him to join in their prayer. This scene just seemed over the top and out of place.
Still, the performances were fantastic, including Tamara Tunie as the surviving flight attendant, Margaret. Denzel is also great and the performances all around him are magnificent. And the crash scene is also great and disturbingly realistic. The story line is also great, too bad they had to put in so many crazy religious references, still, this film raises many important issues, including whether Whip should be admired or hated for saving as many lives as he did. After all, Hugh says that all the flights in the simulator crashed, with everyone on board dying. I thought what he did was heroic, but I can't admire him. He betrayed the public's trust, as the judge told him. This film is no Argo, but Denzel Washington turns in a great performance. As of right now, only second to Lincoln's Daniel Day-Lewis. Grade: A-