Review: Flightplan

Note: This review was contributed by Ryan Stewart

Stomping your feet and demanding that an airline crew search for your missing child is no big deal; it's all in a day's work for them. If you want to see a real show, start hinting around about the T word at thirty-five thousand feet. The friendly facade of the flight crew will immediately boil off, exposing them for what they really are - courteous jailers who have the authority to subdue you, cuff you or kill you if necessary. The best scene in Flightplan comes when Jodie Foster pulls the ultimate post-9/11 fire alarm: she approaches a group of fellow passengers - fidgety Arabs - and announces to one and all that they are a threat to the aircraft. How things come to this point is a bit of a stretch, but Foster is so good at playing the ‘of sound mind and body’ type that you believe anything she says – even that her child has just vanished into the re-circulated air.

 
 
Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a propulsion engineer in transit from Berlin to New York, with her husband's freshly sealed coffin in the hold of the plane. His unexplained suicide in Berlin is hustled past us by the opening credits' end, so that we won't (or will) plug it into the puzzle an hour later. Pratt and her six-year old daughter, Julia, settle into an empty row of a strangely luxurious airliner - it's like an entire airplane built out of the Mick Jagger section of the Concorde - and drift off to sleep. Awakening a few hours later, Pratt finds that Julia has disappeared, Sommersby-style, along with anything that could prove her existence, such as her boarding pass. It seems so absurd that, at first, the other passengers refuse to help search for her.

Nobody does mental constipation like Jodie Foster. With her tightly-wrapped skull and brooding, lipless severity, she's the perfect choice to play someone facing a profound logic crisis. Portraying a character who thrives in the world of probability and high mathematics is second nature to her – she even speaks a little German in the opening scenes, lest we discern any imbalance in her perfect-SAT mind. When it becomes plain that her daughter is really, really not in the passenger cabin, she immediately begins chiseling away the impossible, Sherlock Holmes-style, to get at the improbable. She throws up conspiracy theories of who may have stolen her child and why – one being that the Arabs in the front row want the child as leverage to make Foster comply with some terrorist act – and quickly alarms the plane's onboard air marshall, played by sleepy-time actor Peter Sarsgaard.

The interplay between Sarsgaard and Foster is hard to gauge since he has her in a security hold during most of their conversations, but they both bring a kind of bored-by-it-all New England authenticity that helps anchor the incredible premise. They fluctuate their voices in perfect concert with the demands of the script, unlike some actors who shout every line into the face of their co-star. The good acting is necessary: if not for their compelling performances, the whole premise of the film would never get past the boarding gate. Further credibility is added by a roster of high-quote supporting players, including Sean Bean, Erika Christensen, and Greta Scacchi. Scacchi has an especially interesting little cameo as a conveniently on-board grief counselor who is assigned to chaperone Foster after her wig-out.

Is there more to Scacchi’s role than meets the eye? The final thirty minutes of the film are crunched together in such a way as to frustrate any attempt at piecing together the puzzle while you watch, but it occurs to me that she may have been lured into this bite-sized role with the understanding that her character was actually important to the plot. It’s hard to say more without giving away the big twist, which announces itself with all the subtlety of a Twilight Zone reveal. One huzzah I will give to the filmmakers, however, is that they maintain the highwire act of keeping the audience guessing by blurring genre conceits. Is this story going to take a supernatural turn? Is it strictly earthbound? There are times when you’re not really sure.

I’m thinking in particular of a late scene in which Foster is down in the green-lit bowels of the aircraft searching for her child. Snaking along the gunnels of the cargo hold, she happens upon the coffin of her husband, strapped in for the journey and softly rumbling from the natural turbulence. His body is just another piece of cargo, roughed in for the journey home. It’s an intensely surreal and profoundly illogical moment, and provides a good counterpoint to the high-powered bean counter mentality Kyle Pratt relies on. For a character who must surely operate on the level of a mathematical near-genius, it’s the ultimate ‘does not compute’ moment.

Jodie Foster’s mid-career gearshift into high-gloss, cocktail thrillers is not an unwelcome change. The post-Silence of the Lambs period seemed to be unproductive for her, with much time and effort supposedly poured into a Leni Riefenstahl project, and directorial efforts that went mostly unfulfilled. Like most moviegoers, I applauded her for throwing the Hannibal script in the trash and for choosing to work with master craftsmen like David Fincher. If she’s not going to rest on her Academy laurels and wait for the big fish to come to her, then she’s obviously welcome in above-board genre movies. God knows they could use her.