Watch for one especially riveting scene

Rating: 8/10 (24 April 2013)

It seems hard us to discuss addiction without also talking about faith and the higher power. And so it is with Flight.
"Whip", played by Denzel Washington is a pilot and alcoholic. I initially missed an important detail early on – that the woman he wakes up with in the first scene is an attendant on the flight he pilots later that morning.
The film doesn't hold back in its contempt for simple-minded religiosity. Whip's co-pilot, who later states that nothing happens unless God wills it, cannot summon personal authority when the need to do so is staring him in the face. The film's position is put bluntly when the wing of their plane neatly separates an evangelical church from its steeple.
I was transfixed by a magnificent scene in the stairwell of a hospital. With one eye bandaged shut, Whip's perspective is occluded as he encounters an angel of sorts, another patient with an addiction. She is positioned just above him. Soon they are joined by another sort of angel, clattering up from below with his IV stand. Doomed by terminal cancer, the Angel Below is struck by the beauty of the Angel Above. Dis-inhibited by a short life expectancy he bluntly asks her, "Are you going to die?" The other two make eye contact, connected in fear.
The Angel Below expresses the joy of life in a notable way: "I wish I could bottle this feeling...about how beautiful every breath of life is". The Angel Above assumes it must be the chemotherapy that makes him honest and euphoric. The scene is five minutes of movie magic.
Whip later allies with false angels.
As addicts will do, he stops at nothing to protect his alcohol use. Pious advice and testimony do not steer him from a flight path of destruction. Only when an NTSB inquisitor challenges him to bear false witness does he "come to Jesus" and confront an opportunity to bring his flight to an end.
A commercial pilot friend of mine assures me all the flying-related stuff is, in his word, "booogus". As a behavioral health professional, I'd say that the miracle Hollywood ending is bogus too (though with just one "o"). The film was highly enjoyable just the same.