Flightplan vs The Vanishing

The other night on Letterman, Jodie Foster sang in French while spinning a basketball on her finger. It was pretty obvious that Dave could have thrown in some logarithms or maybe a crossword and she would have done that too. Jodie Foster is smart. Like, maybe even smarter than you. And unlike practically every other actor ever, it is impossible for Jodie Foster to portray unintelligence onscreen. Uneducated, maybe. Even in Nell, when she was all scruff and mime, once in a while you could see in her eyes, “I know my face is dirty, but I'm inventing language.” Flightplan, like Contact and Panic Room, gives us a Jodie Foster character as smart as the real version. And, as in those movies, she might be losing it, just a little. Forget Red Eye, this is Crazy Eye.

Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an aeronautics engineer, or whatever, traveling from Berlin to New York with her young daughter. Her husband has just died, and is in a coffin on the plane. Maybe. Because Kyle worked on the plane, and maybe because she's traveling with a corpse, she gets to board early. She and her daughter settle in, about halfway down the aisle, with her daughter at the window. The plane is huge, and soon it's in the sky. We get several shots of the interior of the plane, which is two levels just for passengers, plus a lounge and the cockpit and flight attendant stations and various holds and nooks and even the occasional cranny. The plane is so big, I kept expecting to see a member of Team Zissou.

Kyle and her daughter, Julia, are sad and lonely, and we've already seen that they mostly interact in ways that excludes Julia: Kyle watches Julia sleep, for example, or rushes to a taxi with the child under her coat. Is Julia imaginary? Deceased? After a nap on the plane, Kyle wakes up and Julia is gone. We saw her, but then we've seen Patrick Swayze and Nicole Kidman and Bruce Willis in movies where they weren't there either. We know sometimes that actors are hired for characters that are no more. And no one on the plane has seen Julia. No one. At all. So as Kyle runs up and down aisles, questioning passengers and digging through overhead compartments, you might start to make a swirly motion by your temple, perhaps accompanied by the words “cuckoo” or “loco” or maybe just some whistling.

Kyle fairs no better against the other characters. The passengers are all incredulous, as if can't she just pick up another kid in a gift shop when we land? And the flight attendants are no better, sighing each time the hassle of searching the plane for a child is brought up. One of them, played by Erica Christenson, verges on sympathy, but she's also portrayed as the least with-it of the attendants. You get the idea it could be a lost kid or a missing Coke, and the answer would be the same: “I—I don't remember. I thought I poured him a Diet Coke, but it could have been a Dr. Pepper. It definitely wasn't a Sprite, unless it was. Maybe. Kid? What kid?” Sean Bean plays the pilot, so we're automatically supposed to assume he's the villain, and Peter Saarsgard plays an on-board air marshal, so we automatically assume he's awesome and sleepy and maybe wants to buy a new hybrid car in real life.

The reason to watch this stuff is Jodie Foster. See, Flightplan is mainly bullshit. If Kyle Pratt is a crazy widower with a recently deceased daughter, then the crew would likely be alerted to her condition ahead of time and wouldn't treat her like such a nuisance. And if her daughter is alive and missing, then, come on, someone saw her. We saw her, so we can only assume, until some Shyamalan-style alert at the end, that the kid is alive and somewhere on the plane. So, luckily, we're on Jodie Foster's side. As if there's another option. Foster is exceptionally good, as good as she's ever been. Yeah, that good. Foster's intelligence shows through in all of Kyle's decisions. You can see the wheels turning as she comes up with all the questions anybody might ask of her. Foster goes to great lengths—successfully—to show us Kyle's frustration and possibly-slipping sanity. Her darting eyes; the way puffs of air force her words out; the way she holds her hands, for crying out loud. So, it's a little off-putting that Flightplan director Robert Schwentke feels the need to constantly telegraph Kyle's mental state by spinning the camera around and around her in every scene. Dude, stand still; it's Jodie Foster.

So, is she going to get her daughter back? Is Kyle crazy? Is she a danger to the other passengers? Throughout Flightplan, we're led to believe there's something mystical going on. Snowy flashbacks of Kyle's possibly-dead husband, water dripping from an umbrella, her child's breath on a window. Is there some kind of Shyamalan switcheroo coming at us? Is Kyle herself dead? Is she even on a plane? All of these thoughts ran through my head as Kyle ran through the plane, kicking ass and causing trouble. My favorite theory was that Kyle, driven insane by the deaths of her husband and daughter, is hallucinating in an asylum.

She's not. Flightplan's resolution is way more conventional than the bulk of the movie leads you to believe it might be. It's basically Panic Room in the sky, with Foster protecting her kid and smartly taking on what winds up being pretty cheesy villains. I was hoping it would be a little more Hitchcockian, maybe even a little DePalmaian, with some split-screen and fake blood. There's none of that either. Just Foster, in tight close-ups, being smart and so good. It might seem a waste to put such a good performance in a movie that's basically a romantic subplot away from being something made for Lifetime. But I think nothing needs a stellar performance more than a movie that would otherwise be just okay. It reminds me of The River Wild, with Kevin Bacon and Meryl Streep going all Method Intense in service of…The River Wild.

So, watch Panic Room again, if you wanna (but not The River Wild, cause, seriously? The River Wild?), or maybe The Sixth Sense, which is just about a perfect version of what the initial moments of Flightplan suggest it might be, but isn't. But for me, won't you browse a little deeper next time you're on Netflix, and rent the original Dutch version of The Vanishing? For me? Please?

The Vanishing is what I'm assuming is the best scary Dutch movie ever. It's got the simplest of plots: A man and his wife are on vacation. They stop at a convenience store for snacks and beer. He waits in the parking lot, but she never returns. Ever. And like with Flightplan, we think we know what happened, and we're mostly on the husband's side, but The Vanishing goes so far, and backs up the mystery with the kind of dread that you don't see often in mainstream movies (indeed, there's an American version of The Vanishing that completely cops out near the end, and it even had the original director). See, in The Vanishing, the search for the missing person is a little longer than your average flight. It's three years. And there's no question about whether or not the main character is going crazy, because how could he not? The movie supplies all the answers the husband and the audience is after, and never compromises for a second. What happened to the wife is shown to the husband and us in the final moments of the movie, and I'm at a loss for a more horrifying sequence.

The Vanishing was directed by George Sluizer, and has the open, sunny, documentary-style tone of a travelogue, although now that I think about it, so did Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The characters are so well-presented and acted (especially Gene Beroets, as the distraught husband), and put right out there for us. It's not so much a mystery who did what, but how, and why, and if a convenience store is big enough to lose someone in, and just how many details a photograph can hold, and how much the light from a single match can show. Jodie Foster speaks fluent French; let's pretend that somewhere, there's a creepy original version of Flightplan that absolutely rules.

Flightplan: B-
The Vanishing: A