Life is too often a reflection on emptiness. We pass our time contemplating the things that are no longer here; the way we were, the places we knew and, most importantly, the things we've lost -- all remind us that change is everywhere, and it is futile to deny its company.
This is what the Japanese called mono no aware, or the Portuguese saudade. But here in America, it's just a part of death and taxes.
In Flightplan, the struggle is not against change but how we know that change happened precisely the way we believe it did.
The movie begins with Kyle Pratt, a jet propulsion engineer, identifying her husband's body in a Berlin morgue. She's taking anxiety pills but it doesn't stop her from seeing him on the subway and on park benches. Kyle is taking her daughter with her to the United States in order to bury her husband near the place he was born.
They're flying home on a plane Kyle helped design when, after a nap, Kyle awakes to find her daughter missing. Ostensibly, it shouldn't be difficult to find a child lost in an airplane. It is, as one passenger observes, just a long tube -- there aren't many ways for someone to abscond with a kidnapped child.
However, Kyle's panic escalates as she looks for her daughter. She even forces the captain to conduct searches of the plane and exhausts the flight personnel to help her search. Yet no one on the plane remembers Kyle's daughter. Moreover, only Kyle is listed on the passenger log. When the Berlin morgue is contacted, they inform the crew that Kyle is bringing home two bodies, not one.
The remaining plot trajectory is predictable, but the movie is redeemed by its sensitive, intelligent treatment of the material it contends with.
Flightplan is about a woman who's dawdling along the edge of instability, tethered to reality only because she still has her daughter and has not lost her ability to reason. When it severs one of her supports, the film becomes a study of how intellect is conscripted to the service of what can only be pure belief.
The suspense at play is well done, as Kyle's resourcefulness rises in proportion to her chances of getting pepper-sprayed by the air marshal. Even as the film flirts with absurdity, it never surrenders Kyle's ability to intuit two steps before the audience and one step before the plot.
Much of the movie's tension hinges upon the ability of Jodie Foster, playing Kyle, to cover the full spectrum of psychological malfunction, which she does quite well. It's a performance enhanced by her character's claustrophobic environment. The film captures that sense of isolation found in an airplane, the lonely feeling of flying 37,000 feet in the air, seeing civilization as nothing more than colonies of glowing ants.
Though not without some turbulence, Flightplan is a success. Even if it is made from the genre recipes passed down from one generation of commercial filmmaking to another, Flightplan flavors its ingredients with some shakes of creativity and a kiss of style. Despite its limitations, it's one of the better arrivals of the season.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
