FLIGHTPLAN Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Touchstone Pictures
Grade: B-
Directed by: Robert Schwentke
Written by: Peter A. Dowling, Billy Ray
Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen, Sean
Bean
Screened at: AMC, NYC, 9/21/05 How was that last flight you took, the one that lasted seven hours when your knees were crunched up to your chin and for entertainment they played some G-rated movie that you could barely see from 20 feet away? How would you like instead to fly on a luxurious plane with an upstairs lounge, just like the piano deck that American Airlines used to have? But wait. You can go one better than that. Instead of tuning in to the elevator music on your headset, how would you like some live theater, just like a Broadway show, right on deck where the principal performer scoots back and forth passing by your seat close enough for you to get an autograph? This is the mixed blessing of some 435 passengers on Alto Airlines (the plane comes from the head of production designer Alexander Hammond but they say such aircraft really exist now). The folks on board, not an exceptionally diverse lot considering that there was not a single black person out of the 435 passengers in their seats, but it did have a few of Middle-Eastern extraction. This made them immediately suspect in what looks like a case of mayhem brought about by one passenger distraught because her husband was coming back to New York in a box (suicide, according to the mortician’s report). That’s not all. This passenger’s six-year-old daughter is missing! Not missing within the air terminal, though she was for a minute or so, but on the plane after it became airborne. The mother is Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), her small girl is Julia Pratt (Marlene Lawson), the air marshall who looks for her is Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), and the chief pilot, who gets increasingly uptight and furious at what looks like a nut job’s endangering his passengers, is Captain Rich (Sean Bean). “Flightplan” is theatrical in the sense that most of the action takes place within an aircraft flying at 37,000 feet. The definition of theater is: two or more people trapped either physically or psychologically in the same place where none can escape, and at that height you can bet that no one who boarded the plane was considering a departure until it landed. If that’s the case, why is little Julia Pratt missing? On the one hand there’s good reason to blame her mom, loving and caring though she may be, since she allowed her daughter to stretch out a few rows behind her across three vacant seats, then dozed off only to discover that the seats were again vacant. In Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray’s screenplay with German-born Robert Schwentke (“Tattoo”) at the helm, “Flightplan” makes for a mixed bag as both a thriller and a human drama. The audience cannot be blamed for taking some wild guesses to where this drama is going. We do see Julia boarding the plane with her mother and her Teddy bear, we watch her drawing a little heart on the foggy window. When Kyle cannot find her daughter, we figure that the crew will make a thorough search at the all the hiding places that a small child can exploit. What panicks Kyle is not that the crew is searching only perfunctorily for the girl, but that the flight attendants, Stephanie (Kate Beahan) and Fiona (Ericka Christensen) report that they did not see the girl board the plane, that her assigned seat 26A was vacant, and that therefore the mother is so off her nut with grief from her husband’s death in Berlin that she has imagined boarding with someone else. In fact, the plane’s manifest did not indicate anyone named Julia Pratt and, even worse, a report came back that Julia died along with her father in Berlin–the latter having allegedly taken the girl with her when he leaped from a roof. The passengers become increasingly worried when the thought hits that this insane woman could somehow cause the plane to crash, given the way she uses her knowledge of the aircraft since she is by trade a propulsion engineer. Much of the movie is taken up with showing off Jodie Foster running the gamut of emotions from relaxed–even providing soothing words to her daughter about the safety of the aircraft–to fully paranoid. She runs back and forth in the cabin, opens every lavatory door and watches as the crew search the carry-on decks. She bangs on the captain’s door demanding to speak with him–as though a captain would know any more than the crew–and in one case slams a fire extinguisher into a person’s face. Jodie Foster is perfect for the role, for her ability to show a calibrated rise in emotion. She is dressed like someone training for the marathon, which in fact she appears to be doing. We get so taken in by her compelling performance that we almost forget the main reason we’re in the theater. We want to know just what happened. Was Julia abducted by aliens? Does she exist at all, given the fact that she has no presence on the manifest and, in fact, the Berlin mortuary reported that she’s dead? Is this a ghost story? That brings us, then to the conclusion, which is not only conventional and generic but downright preposterous. The careless script gives director Schwentke no way to have a credible ending, which means that while we admire Ms. Foster’s tour-de-force performance, we leave the theater shaking our heads in dismay at the absurdity, at the plot holes larger than you’ll find in any other film this year. Rated PG-13. 93 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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