Thursday, June 21, 2007

"Flightplan"

Saw this movie with Jodie Foster on DVD last night. (By that I mean Jodie Foster was in the movie and I saw the movie. Jodie and I, in other words, were not on a movie date.)

(No Wednesday night Bible study for the rest of the summer. There was some sort of board-game activity last night at church. I should say "bored-game night". I came home after the supper. Carol, on the other hand, stayed on. She was in her element with the bored games and enjoyed every minute of them. Which leads to the question, "Can this marriage be saved?")

(Alert! Alert! I may give away too much of this movie.)

Anyway, I put on this DVD. It's not the kind Carol would have enjoyed: mother loses her kid on transatlantic flight and everyone else thinks she's delusional and never brought the kid on board in the first place. The movie is spookily dark. Jodie Foster is at her usual best, and Sean Bean plays the captain of the airplane, a giant 757 sort of thing. He's good, playing a slightly befuddled, tough, good guy. (He was in Lord of the Rings, the original member of the Fellowship who gets killed by orcs toward the end of the first movie. Hollywood can't decide whether he should be a hero or a villain when they cast him. He can go either way.)

The plot moved quickly, so quickly that after the movie I was unable to explain the plot to Carol. But it seemed to make plenty of sense as it was flying by. Of course, it comes out OK at the end, but the denouement is disappointing.

What disturbed me about the denouement is that the Jodie Foster character is essentially unforgiving of the people who didn't believe her, in particular the captain and an Arab passenger whom she erroneously suggested had been looking in her daughter's bedroom window before they left for the airport. During the denouement, both of them make gestures of regret about their not believing her, and she just looks at them without saying anything like, "Gee, I can understand the position you were in with me, although you probably should have realized this movie was made in Hollywood and I'm Jodie Foster. But it's OK."

I guess forgiveness - grace - is not a big value in Hollywood. But the movie disappointed me in that respect. I would have given it a B, even a B+, with an appropriate denouement. Instead, it gets the B-.

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