Failure to launch

Noel Vera

"Flyboys" is handsomely produced and actually looks as if the
filmmakers had read a page or two of history--the Lafayette
Escadrille was in fact a squadron of American fighters under French
Command, who volunteered to fight the Germans before the United
States officially joined the war (the First World War); it really
was commanded by a Captain Georges Therault (played here with
uncharacteristic stickiness by Luc Besson's former ubermensch, Jean
Reno), and it did have for mascots a pair of lion cubs, Whiskey and
Soda.

Beyond that--I don't know. German fighter planes were not painted
red all over (that distinct color scheme was exclusively for Manfred
Von Richthofen--The Red Baron), and they were not Fokker triplanes
(those came later, in 1917); the pilots were
called 'airmen,' 'pilots' or 'aviators,' not 'flyboys'--that was a
World War 2 term. There was a real black World War 1 pilot named
Eugene, a former boxer who actually downed two German fighters and
was the world's first black combat aviator, but his last name was
Bullard, not Skinner.

But that's mostly nitpicking. My basic complaint is that for all its
running time--a bloated hundred and thirty-nine minutes--the whole
thing feels about as substantial as one of their planes, canvas and
wood kites held together by wire and glue, mostly (the pilots were
almost as likely to die from structural failure of their aircraft as
they were from actual combat). For all the male bonding visible
onscreen and the private confessions made to each other in the dead
of night, in each others' bedrooms, these people don't leave much of
an impression--they're noble, pointedly heterosexual kids (raise
eyebrow here) out on a lark or adventure, mostly above the mud and
mire that was the fate of ground combatants.

Even that could have been an interesting subject for a film--how
these privileged few enjoyed luxurious accommodations and the best
available planes, and seemed largely cut off from the horrors of war-
-until the few ferocious minutes in the air when they confront the
enemy face-to-face. It's an insane, surreal situation that calls for
someone with the clear-eyed gaze and obsession with detail to study
it properly--Erich Von Stroheim if he had been given sufficient
money (and in fact in Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," he plays one
such aviator); here we have Tony Bill, a director who worked mostly
in TV and whose most interesting film was arguably his first, the
small-scale "My Bodyguard" (featuring an extremely young Adam
Baldwin in his first impassively menacing performance, as a boy's
hired bully). Bill, working from a script by Phil Sears, Blake
Evans, and David S. Ward (best known for his script for "The Sting,"
though my favorite was "Major League") aims mostly for nobility and
wholesomeness, the better to draw in the PG crowd. The worst these
kids--and they are unambiguously juvenile, in the least interesting
way possible--are capable of is heavy drinking off-duty; no loose
women, no drugs, no serious vices.

The ostensible hero Blaine Rawlings (James Franco, using an
inconsistent Texas drawl and channeling James Dean for the nth time)
meets a French prostitute--but then, ah, it turns out she's not a
prostitute, she's a Very Nice Girl (she lived with her older brother
and takes care of her younger siblings, a sort of "Snow Blanc and
the Three Smurfs"). Franco clowns around on a horse and instead of
bedding the girl gives her chaste kisses (Were there even kisses?
Their scenes together were so tedious I could barely pay attention).
The men's backstories aren't much more interesting: Skinner (Abdul
Salis) talks about racism, but it's an ad for tolerance brought in
out of the blue that leads nowhere in particular, except for an end
title noting that the United States Air Force wouldn't let him fly.
Briggs Lowry (Tyler Labine) joins mainly to try and win the respect
of his parents, but his attitude towards their lack of love is more
rueful sadness than real (and rightful) anger and borders on saintly
martyrdom. Aviator movies are mostly melodramas on the ground, but
this particularly leaden melodrama is so mellow it's soporific.

Films like these usually make up for it in the air, and while the
mostly digitized aerial battles are fairly well done (Except for the
bullets leaving vapor trails--vapor trails! What in the world were
the effects people thinking of when they did that?), you can't help
but think of William Wellman's 1927 "Wings," where real pilots
actually risked their lives on camera (and in fact Wellman's last
film was on this very same subject, the 1958 "Lafayette
Escadrille"). "Flyboys'" high point is an attack on a dirigible,
which takes its best ideas from Howard Hughes' 1930 epic "Hell's
Angels," down to the final assault that actually brings the
dirigible down. Bill, of course, did not spend three years of his
life and 3.8 million in '30s dollars on his own project, did not
have a massive dirigible model burst into flames (Bill used a
virtual airship), nor did he have forty planes and three cameras
flying around doing stunts so dangerous three of the pilots lost
their lives during the shoot (Hughes himself flew in one highly
perilous sequence, and promptly crashed his plane). Worse, Bill
doesn't have the flamboyance to imbue his characters with the kind
of outsized heroism--bordering on suicidal fanaticism--Hughes does,
as when his German dirigible commander orders that the vessel's
cloud car be cut loose (with some of the crew still inside), and
then orders men to jump to their deaths, all to lighten and save the
airship.

It doesn't even have to be a silent film, or a black-and-white
classic ("Hell's Angels" was substantially reshot (with some
dialogue scenes directed by James Whale) to take advantage of the
advent of recorded sound) to be better: Hayao Miyazaki's 1992 "Porco
Rosso" featured a climactic dogfight with far superior flying
sequences, displaying a greater understanding of the weight, mass
and aerodynamic properties of flying machines than this movie could
ever hope to achieve; more, it has the kind of assured storytelling--
wit, whimsy, sophisticated adult banter, a kind of profound
melancholy, all in a lighter-than-air soufflé--that lifts its story
beyond the ken of the usual aviator's melodrama. If all this seems
to be a roundabout, longwinded way of saying "Flyboys" is no good--
well, that's what it is. The story's lame, the flying sequences
tame, the actors barely game; you're better off seeing some other
picture, leaving the way you came.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/29/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)