Movie Review: Flightplan and Proof: Blondes, Grim and Dreary

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Flightplan: What's a Mother To Do?

In Flightplan Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) boards a leviathan jet (that she helped design) to bring her husband's body back from Berlin to the US for burial. Having settled her traumatized young daughter into the window seat, Kyle falls asleep; when she wakes up the little girl is missing. Kyle enlists the help of the flight crew only to discover that no one else remembers seeing her daughter on the plane; eventually Kyle is presented with documentary evidence that her daughter, too, died in Berlin. A shrink tries to help Kyle "understand" how grief has induced her delusion, but during this conversation Kyle discovers what she takes to be irrefutable proof that her daughter was, in fact, on board. Sensing some kind of conspiracy, Kyle buttons her lip but is more determined than ever to battle against the stewardesses, the captain, an air marshal, and the other passengers who see her as an hysteric and even a criminal.

As Kyle, Foster functions as an action star to the extent possible given that the movie takes place almost entirely on the airplane. She sprints the length of the aisles, climbs and crawls through hatches into the luggage hold and some place referred to here as "avionics," coldcocks the bad guy. Thus, like last year's The Forgotten (click here for my review), Flightplan presents the mother as a chivalric hero, fighting the combined forces of evil, confusion, and indifference to recover her child.

Despite an Arab red herring, Flightplan draws no more than peripherally on the post September 11 fear of flying. (Though Victor Davis Hanson disagrees.) It is, rather, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), which, along with The 39 Steps (1935), represents Hitchcock's work at its most charming. (Some people might add To Catch a Thief (1955), and it's in this spirit that Stanley Donen directed the wonderful Charade (1963).) In these older, less technocratic movies, the suspense is tonic rather than truly frightening, and almost comically glamorous.

In The Lady Vanishes, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), an attractive young Englishwoman, is going home by train from a winter vacation in a fictional central European country to marry a nobleman. While returning a pair of spectacles to an elderly woman on the platform she's conked on the head by a flowerpot. The old girl, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a briskly unfussy governess, takes charge of Iris on the train, gives her some tea, and settles her in a compartment across from her. When Iris wakes up from a doze, Miss Froy has vanished and the other people in the compartment claim she was never there.

The only passenger willing to help Iris is dashing, eccentric Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a folk musicologist she'd fought with at the hotel the night before. Even though he thinks Iris is a "stinker," and doesn't quite believe her story, she is awfully pretty, so he plays detective alongside her and is imaginative enough to be of considerable use. Indeed, together they foil the nefarious plot—without even knowing why anyone would kidnap the harmless old body in the first place—and in the process fall in love. When they reach London at last, Iris spots her fiancé on the platform and promptly dashes into Gilbert's taxi.

It doesn't feel as if the Flightplan team had remade The Lady Vanishes so much as scrubbed it of all extraneous material. It's the extraneous material, however, that makes the original so charming. The romantic comedy is entirely unconnected to the suspense and yet it sets the jaunty tone; it makes international intrigue seem like the kind of party game that's played in pairs to loosen inhibitions, encourage necking. (Like the orange-passing game that Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant play in the nightclub scene in Charade.) There's also a variety of humorous turns, by Dame May Whitty, who combines dottiness and wiliness as the mysterious Miss Froy, Paul Lukas as a maddeningly sympathetic doctor who finds Iris's case very "interesting" and who has an unsatisfactory explanation for everything, and Catherine Lacey as a sketchy nun.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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