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Absorbing 'Flightplan' maintains its mystery
Jodie Foster
Touchstone Pictures
Director: Robert Schwentke
Stars: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean
MPAA rating: PG-13 for violence and some intense plot material.
But she can't be heard over the whistles and the clikety-clack, and so she traces "Froy" with her finger on the window just as the train enters a tunnel.
In Anthony Thorne's 1947 novel "So Long at the Fair," filmed in 1950, a young woman arrives in Paris with her brother and soon cannot find anyone who will admit having seen him.
The much-cribbed plot was still being played out when Harrison Ford misplaced his wife in "Frantic" (1988).
"Flightplan" shrinks the game board to an airplane -- albeit a huge one with two tiers of passengers and enough storage space to hide the whole NFL and all Steelers tailgaters.
Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) would know. She helped design the plane she's taking from Berlin to New York City with her 6-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston).
Six days earlier, Kyle's husband plunged to his death without apparent motivation. She's taking him home in a secured casket.
You can't blame Kyle for being wrung out and for nodding off shortly after the flight begins and about the time Julia traces a heart on the window.
Did she? Did Julia do that? Try finding her. Or anyone who remembers having seen her. Or any record of her having been aboard.
Robert Schwentke has directed "Flightplan" with attention to compositions that meticulously offer and withhold information.
Is the mother a grieving hysteric who's in denial? A victim of criminal conspiracy? Of a child who wandered, then dozed off?
The film is full of visual clues. What's tantalizing is that they can be interpreted at least two ways.
Like all good mysteries -- and this is a particularly exciting one -- "Flightplan" is about clue accumulation and interpretation.
It's framed so intensely that one wishes it were a bit more attentive to minutiae -- to sharper observations of the crew and to more of the 425 passengers, who are virtually monolithic and, with too few exceptions, faceless.
Barely three characters emerge with definition -- the conscientious Captain Rich (Sean Bean), cold-eyed Air Marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) and a sympathetic psychologist (Greta Scacchi).
The screenplay is credited to newcomer Peter A. Dowling and to Billy Ray. The latter wrote and directed the superb "Shattered Glass" about plagiarism by a major magazine's most popular investigative reporter.
What they've wrought here with Schwentke's skilled execution is an absorbing mystery thriller that will hold any audience to the finish.
It works in no small part because Foster, more than any actress of the modern era since Sissy Spacek, deftly balances fear, heartache and sheer, willed courage.
I promise you that by the end of the movie you'll have a handful of legitimate protests about red herrings and whatnot. And you'll be thinking or saying, "Yes, but ..." and "Now just a ding-dang minute."
Tell you this much: I reversed my assumptions mid-picture.
