Movie Review: Flightplan

Flightplan (2005) 

Directed by Robert Schwentke

Written by Peter A. Dowling, Billy Ray

Starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgard, Erika Christensen, Kate Beahan, Greta Scacchi, Sean Bean, Matt Bomer

Release Date September 23rd, 2005

Published September 23rd, 2005

Jodie Foster is an actress of particular tastes. Since her Oscar win in 1991 for Silence of The Lambs, Foster has been very particular about what films she makes, what directors she works with and what actors she co-stars. Few stars are known to be as demanding as Jodie Foster when it comes to even the minor details of her work.

Knowing this makes her latest film Flightplan so surprising and yet not puzzling. It's a surprise that Flightplan is so astonishingly bad but not puzzling as to why it's so bad.

Kyle Pratt (Foster) has lost her husband in what she believes was a tragic accident. Now returning his body to their home in New York from their temporary home in Germany, Kyle and her daughter Julia (Brent Sexton) have a 12 hour flight ahead of them. This, however, will not be a typically uncomfortable flight. Instead, at 25,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, Julia Pratt is going to go missing.

After catching a few minutes sleep in some empty seats near the back of the plane, Kyle wakes up and cannot find her daughter. Enlisting the help of the crew she exhaustively searched the plane and finds nothing. Soon Kyle is demanding to speak to the captain (Sean Bean) and catching the attention of Air Marshall Carson (Peter Sarsgaard).

Some digging by the crew reveals that no one saw Kyle and Julia get on the plane. Once on board none of the crew members or passengers can remember seeing Julia either. Even a check of the flight manifest reveals that Julia was never processed for boarding and there was no boarding pass in her name. Can it be that Julia died along with her father in that tragic accident and Julia has only imagined her daughter alive and well on the plane?

That is an intriguing setup, but in execution Flightplan, pardon the pun, fails to take off. Director Robert Schwentke, working in his first American feature, has the beats and rhythm of the thriller genre down but the script from Billy Ray and Peter Dowling hinges on one of the single worst screenwriting tricks and hackneyed cliches in the genre.

In attempting to build tension Schwentke makes every other character aside from Foster shifty-eyed and suspicious. Everyone is a suspect, fellow passengers, crew members and such but no one other than Foster's character is portrayed as remotely sympathetic. If it weren't for the goofy thriller music and the shifty-eyed acting everyone on the film other than Foster might come off as rational compared to Foster's wacked mommy.

The super suspicious supporting cast is meant to create isolation which in turn creates more drama, especially considering the already confining location. However, to make such a method work the film needed Jodie Foster to deliver a character the audience feels for and wants to follow. As great an actress as Foster is, her Kyle Pratt is too much of a nut and a flake for anyone to really feel for her.

In her return to the American big screen (she appeared in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement a year or so ago) after a three year hiatus, exascerbated by production delays on her directorial effort Flora Plum, Jodie Foster struggles with a shrill portrayal of a mother on the edge. Foster's Kyle Pratt can be forgiven for becoming unhinged after the death of her husband and disapppearance of her daughter but the character reaches a level of unreasonable behavior that would have had any other passenger sedated and chained to their seat.

Flightplan reminded me in a weird way of the 2000 Harrison Ford-Michele Pfeiffer film What Lies Beneath. Both films were thrillers with big important twists at the end and both films failed in delivering climaxes that matched the intriguing set ups. In What Lies Beneath Michele Pfeiffer delivers half of a great performance before being undone by series of poorly executed twists. Jodie Foster is similarly undone in Flightplan by twists that defy both logic and taste. Unlike Ms. Pfeiffer, however, the problems with Flightplan have as much to do with the scripting as with Jodie Foster's performance.

The most damnable sin Foster commits is simply not being likable. She never connects with the child playing her daughter and without a sympathetic supporting character as backup the audience is always outside the character watching her as if we were one of her highly annoyed fellow passengers.

After some terrific buzz for his performances in Shattered Glass and Garden State  Peter Sarsgaard has failed in attempts at crossing over to more mainstream fare. His dreary performance in the Kate Hudson thriller Skeleton Key and yet another creepy performance in Flightplan have Sarsgaard on the road to some real bad typecasting. Sean Bean as the captain of the plane and Erika Christenson as one of the flight attendants come off a little better than Sarsgard but not by much. Everytime either one of them looks like they might break from the constrictions of the plot and become sympathetic they are shuffled off screen.

It's a classic Hitchcockian thriller setup-- missing person, confined space, suspicious characters all around-- but the plot of Flightplan never congeals into the kind of crowd pleasing tension-fest that Hitch excelled at. Rather, Flightplan is almost laughably inept in creating tension; that shifty-eyed supporting cast for one is a real hoot as they really do seem to all have the same pair of nervous, wandering eyes with evil intent in every glare regardless of whether they actually are evil.

The film is very well shot; watch out for some really terrific maneuvering through the limited cabin space of the plane that will leave you wondering how they managed to do that.  Schwentke makes great use of his setting and the camerawork at times is able to create the tension the script fails to provide. Great camerawork however is not the kind of rousing crowd pleaser that us movie lovers would like to believe and in the end there is very little in Flightplan that would draw anyone in.

There is now a protest in the works against Flightplan that raises an interesting and disturbing point. The protest gives away an important plot point so if you don't want to know about it, skip ahead.....

The union representing flight attendants is objecting to the portrayal of flight crew and air marshals being portrayed in the film as terrorists. This raises an interesting question; in the post 9/11 world is it appropriate to portray flight crew as terrorists or is it simply irresponsible. Certainly no one profession is immune to being portrayed negatively but there's something unseemly about it. I don't necessarily side with the flight attendant's protest, it is just a movie after all, but I certainly see their point.

All controversies aside Flightplan is a disappointment for fans of Jodie Foster, many of whom felt Panic Room suffered from a similarly overwrought performance. There is a pattern of isolation forming in Jodie Foster's work, and I'm not just talking about settings-- panic rooms, airplanes and such. I mean isolation in the sense that she has cut herself off more and more from her co-stars, specifically her male co-stars. The men of Panic Room and now Flightplan are all bad guys or highly suspsicious and only she can protect that which she loves from these evil men.

I'm not pleading sexism against  Jodie Foster but she has played a large role in shaping her characters with a specific rule about love interests, specifically that there are none in her films. This lack of strong support from male or even female characters, aside from children who are more victim than character, is isolating Jodie Foster from the audience. If no one in the film likes her why should we?