I like books and films about people who fly aeroplanes for a living. William Langewiesche’s books Fly by Wire and Aloft both proved heart-poundingly exciting for me, the very best kind of serious, elegantly written, passionate investigative writing, and with enough dramatic tension to sink a dozen more conventional thrillers. Last year I finally sat down to watch Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, with mixed expectations (at 193 minutes a film better have a reason for existing or you’d walk out in protest) and even now some many months later I’m still a little in love with Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager, and the movie seems unlikely to be dislodged from its joint pole position (with Tarkovsky’s Solaris) at the top of my personal pantheon of cinema any time soon.
I could go on about how weird this all is, given that I am a very nervous flyer to say the least, but we’ll save that for another day. But from what I’ve written above you’d probably have no trouble in guessing that I was very much looking forward to Robert Zemeckis’s new movie Flight, starring Denzel Washington as a maverick airline captain, fighting to save his reputation after an investigation into a fatal air accident proves that he was drunk at the controls. Even the trailer had my pulse racing. I couldn’t wait.
We went to see it on Saturday night. It’s not as long as The Right Stuff, but it’s 138 minutes, which doesn’t exactly make it a short. The opening thirty of those minutes, which deal with the air accident itself, created an atmosphere of what I can only describe as rapt tension – it felt as if everyone in the cinema was holding their breath, so much so that when the plane finally hit the ground I felt a noticeable shift in air pressure as the audience collectively exhaled. And for the following hour and a half, that sense of drama and involvement continued. Washington was just great – wholly believable in his role, dignified yet tragic, brilliant yet dangerously flawed, his Captain ‘Whip’ Whitaker seemed likely to go down as a 9 carat portrayal of the kind of addictive personality that is so often the burden of the highly gifted. Kelly Reilly gave a powerful performance as Nicole, the recovering drug user who befriends Whitaker, only to leave him when it becomes clear that their relationship is likely to push her back over the edge into dependency.
But bugger me those last fifteen minutes. If you ever want to know what it feels like, watching a decent script being strapped to a gurney and having its throat cut, I would urge you to go and see Flight, whose numbingly sententious, tritely simplistic and just generally godawful final act made me so physically and mentally uncomfortable I couldn’t sit still in my seat. What Flight finally and sadly reminded me of was that spate of bizarre films from the late seventies and early eighties (Run Baby Run was one, The Hiding Place was another) which cast themselves as gritty dramas with serious themes but turn out to be little more than propaganda, the peddling of a particular brand of judgemental morality. Just who was responsible for this appalling blunder, which in a matter of moments reduces a credible and creditable exploration of human fallability to a mawkish mess? Whether it was the scriptwriter himself or a Hollywood committee, they ought to be rounded up and made to watch Zemeckis’s earlier outing, What Lies Beneath, which similarly falls apart disastrously in its final half hour. Only that didn’t matter so much, because it was just a stupid ghost story with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. Flight could actually have been a serious movie.
But if Flight seemed an apt demonstration of that old adage about a leopard never changing its spots, the other film I saw this week, Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering Django Unchained, appeared to prove that it is after all possible to come back from the grave. Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, which I looked forward to loudly and at every opportunity, turned out to be so crass and so embarrasingly bad it still makes me squirm to think about it. (I’ve actually sat through it twice to date – and God it’s long – because Chris, who’s not QT’s biggest fan anyway, refused to believe just how awful it was, and so I watched it again with him just to prove the point. Turned out I was right the first time.) But Tarantino is one of those directors I enjoy so much that just as I forgave Woody Allen for Whatever Works, so I was looking forward to Django more or less as if Basterds had never happened.
What a movie. Fellow director Spike Lee has criticised Django for being ‘disrespectful’, but as the film’s star Jamie Foxx asserts, Lee’s position is considerably weakened by him not having seen it. Foxx is a passionate defender of the movie, and he should be proud of his role in it. If he ever gives a better performance than he does in Django I look forward to seeing it.
Django effortlessly achieves what Basterds so memorably failed to do: it combines drama with brio, furious seriousness with QT’s unique brand of deadpan, pitch black humour. Oh yes, it’s daring, controversial even – it treads close to the edge of madness on so many levels. But somehow – miraculously – it keeps its balance. What Django is not is a documentary about the American slave trade. What it is is a grand fantasia, a Wagnerian behemoth of insane brilliance. If it proves something that I was crying during some parts of this film and laughing with delight in others, then there it is.
And bloody hell, that QT man can write. His timing, his feel for dramatic irony and structure, his love of narrative gamesmanship, above all the skilful construction and effortless power of his sentences, is a thrill to experience, every time. That, more than anything else, is why I love him.
It’s worth paying the ticket price of Django Unchained just for the soundtrack. And me? I don’t mind admitting I paid it twice.