"HOLD ON!" with Zemeckis' daring, full-blooded live-action comeback, and Washington in great form

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2012)

Man, what a comeback for Robert Zemeckis to live action! This is a hard-hitting drama that, from the look of the trailer, would appear to be just about the 'hero' factor of a man: what is a hero? This is a subject that with the right approach can really be commandeering. In a sense this is like Zemeckis' Taxi Driver, only substituting alcoholism (with some drugs, though the booze is the key) for insanity. Who can make a difference in this world? Can a pilot who goes on drinking benders and sniffing coke with an ex-wife and kid he doesn't see? Instinct, apparently, can kick in at the most odd and desperate times - such as when a plane malfunctions and it goes into a state of chaos.
What we see with Captain Whip Whitaker, who is a risk-taking but courageous pilot, is gray area. This is not a guy we can entirely root for, and this is good. It's further complicated, and this should be the most complimentary sense, with Denzel Washington's casting. With a few exceptions in his career (i.e. Training Day), Denzel plays a guy the audience can root for. And hey, a hero-pilot is someone people love to lionize like Sullenberger "Sully" from a few years back. But what if the guy is just messed up, or has some internal demons? The script makes reference possibly to a history of familial alcoholism; when Whip returns to his father's old farm, he, in a fit of attempting-to-get- sober, empties and throws out bottles and bottles and cans and cans of liquor. Was this all his? Zemeckis leaves this part off. Good.
Washington is likable even when he is a lout. This could be a criticism that this drunk isn't a *bad* drunk, per-say. Irresponsible, sure, and aggrandizing. But it gets perspective when he's paired against another addict, who is recovering after OD'ing on heroin. The clean-up for this character was perhaps a little too quick, and there is a scene in a hospital stairwell in the middle of the night as Chip recovers where a cancer patient comes along, dropping some God-philosophy, and never appearing again. But these are faults on a small enough level that they don't really knock into what the main vision is of the film: this man, and his very real struggle: what's going to happen with the lucky but sad fact that six of the 102 passengers died(?)
I really admire Zemeckis working in a gray area morally. There were hints of it in Forrest Gump (Jenny's character as not really what Forrest saw her as, and Lt. Dan's struggle to a 'life'), even Back to the Future (she's your MOM, dude!) But here it's like Zemeckis and his writer say 'screw it, let's go into it full-hog'. And the path of the character is so compelling because we care about him much more, or I did anyway, because of his flaws, of his (non-existent) parenting and his fight against the cover of lies he's surrounded himself in: the booze, the coke, the two (or was it three) mini-bottles of vodka found on the plane, and the ensuing investigation. Even the man most in Whitaker's corner, played by Bruce Greenwood in a straight-laced but well-played exasperated performance, doesn't know what the hell to do with him after a while.
In a sense the film is like the best episode of the TV show 'Intervention' never made: we see this character in full dimensions, and it goes further with the performance by its star. You almost take a guy like Washington for granted when he does studio stuff like (as of late) Book of Eli or Safe House. Whip Whittaker is a character, full of pain but also dark, biting humor, warmth, charity, some madness, and Washington plays it all full tilt, but with a lot of subtlety and notes where we just have to watch him, every second of a scene where Zemeckis stays on him. It's almost more about his face, how he changes from cocky-asshole drunk with a buddy like John Goodman's character (who almost comes in like out of a Hunter S. Thompson book, almost not used enough), and when he is sitting at a meeting with his union rep and lawyer (Don Cheadle, grim-faced as usual), the movie is really about that: what is going to do - hell, like the Avengers, man: what is he PREPARED to do?