Pushing Tin
With John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Jake Weber, Kurt Fuller, Vicki Lewis, Matt
It’s impossible to imagine a gun distributor saying, “We’re going to attempt to get as many of these guns off the shelf as possible. We think it’s the responsible thing to do under the circumstances.” After all, this is America, where the freedom of teenage boys to buy guns and the freedom of gun manufacturers to turn a profit are precious to our way of life. And even if we decided we wanted guns taken off shelves, or even if, foolishly, we wanted to remove The Matrix from theaters, neither would happen–because the profit margin in both cases is too large (the profits from video rentals of an old movie would be peanuts by comparison). So we’ll have to reconcile ourselves to a steady diet of pointless speculation about just what it is about trenchcoats and Littleton and bad movies that led to a bloody massacre. But worrying isn’t likely to get us anywhere.
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A lot of reviewers have been saying that Pushing Tin begins with a lot of promise before becoming routine and forgettable, but what’s being promised is a matter of some dispute. One colleague told me he thought the movie was really going to dig into workplace detail and atmosphere the way Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night did. I was hoping for either a variation of Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings or a terse outline reminiscent of the lucid expositional style of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, of how the controllers’ spiels match up with actual air traffic. These three possibilities are somewhat at odds with one another: the interpersonal relationships of Walsh’s truckers on the Warners back lot are far from the closeted group dynamics of Hawks’s aviators within a metaphysical void conjured out of hokey sets at Columbia, while Kubrick’s film focuses on the relationship between humans and their artifacts. The film could have profitably gone in any of these directions, but after the energetic opening it obstinately settles into the primitive star politics of TV.
None of this has much to do with air-traffic controlling, which is brought back into the story only when a couple of artificial climaxes are needed. The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them. During the sporadic Tracon sessions, the possibility of coordinating the controllers’ patter with actual flight maneuvers–the Kubrickian endeavor I was hoping for–is never explored. Newell lazily cuts to a plane in the sky every once in a while but rarely bothers to connect a radar-screen crisis with anything resembling an airborne event, so the suspense of these sequences remains blandly underdeveloped.
