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Instead, it's an account of a leader-of-the-pack contest, in which two men vie for the view from the front of the line. It follows the first dog of the New York air controllers as he loses his place in line when a new man a cooler customer by far joins the team. The new man can take more planes and land them faster and steeper than anyone in the room; he goes to the head of the pack. So the displaced alpha mutt rebels with typical adult restraint: He seduces the new champion's wife.
Thus the movie when it's not indulging in scenes of disheveled men chewing on pencils as they stare at scopes and say incomprehensible things into throat mikes like "Delta 23, increase speed to 160 as you vector leftward for your new inward bound" is mainly about bickering men. Bicker, bicker, bicker. It's the bickering Bickerson boys! "You said " "Did not!" "Did too!" "Did not!" "Made ja blink!" "Hah! Made ja blink!" "Jerk!" "Dope!" "Dork!" "Nerd!"
Boys, boys, can't we talk in our silent voices for a while?
John Cusack, he with the tiny but loud, flibbertigibbety mouth, plays Nick Falzone, who's the head frat boy of the Animal House that the New York airspace radar shop is pictured to be. They're so zany! They're so wacky! Each one's a character! Where's Belushi when you need him?
Cusack, when he's not slinging aluminum in the form of airplanes full of Japanese tourists around the skies or trying to pick up teenage girls in Long Island diners, appears to drive a rented car (it's bright and clean and without personality) and lives in an atrocious house in the burbs with his wife, Queen Elizabeth I. Yes, that's Cate Blanchett, the luminous Australian actress, in the tight jeans with the heels and the six-inch nails and the gold necklaces to absolutely die for! Why she went from ruler of the sceptered isle to shrew of the longest, dreariest island is a professional mystery only an ex-agent can explain.
Nick may or may not be happy; he doesn't really notice. But whatever it is, his world is seriously unhinged when Russell Bell, part Choctaw and all Billy Bob Thornton, drifts into the big room, wearing a feather. The new man has a rep for craziness. He once went bodysurfing through gravity in the turbulence of a landing 747 so he'd know what the wake felt like.
But actually, since he has no true character to play (at least none in the script), Thornton elects to try a last-of-the-Mohicans stoicism as his style. His face remains impassive, his eyes barely slits, his dialogue guttural grunts, lip-lofted sneers or indifferent mutters. Naturally his stillness all but destroys Nick: One is Air Controller as Marlboro Man, the other is Air Controller as Woody Allen.
Russell's one weakness is his wife, a pair of pillowy-pouty red lips with a woman, tattoos and cleavage attached. She's also got a penchant for leopard-skin skirts, cowboy boots and push-up bras and a demeanor that says, "If you don't at least try, you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life." She is played by Angelina Jolie, about which I can say only two words, and they are: hubba hubba.
Coming across her weeping in a grocery store, Nick picks her up by pretending to care about her problems. She does ask him the movie's toughest question: "Does anybody actually think you're charming?" The answer to that would be: Yes, one guy, but unfortunately that guy is the director, Mike Newell. But she yields to him alcohol, her weakness of choice, is involved.
The rest of the movie turns out to have little to do with controlling airborne tin and a lot to do with controlling the heebie-jeebies: It chronicles Nick's nervous breakdown in the wake of this indiscretion, as he pathetically tries to make amends to his cuckolded wife and colleague, even as he's losing his ability to concentrate. Only because the movie is a comedy does he not park Delta 583 in the aft starboard bathroom of United 104 at 4,000 feet above Long Island Sound.
The movie's fundamental problem is that Cusack's character isn't very interesting. Nick's "excellence" appears to be a delusion, as Bell outperforms him at every turn, particularly in the movie's hokey, tacked-on "climax" (unlikely congruence of snowstorm with bomb threat, just like in '70's "Airport"). His wisecracks are seldom wise, he's neither good husband nor good father, and on top of that, I don't like his shoes.
Worse, the movie that takes as its central supposition the coolness, the elan, the macho courage of the air controllers turns out to be their most effective enemy since Ronald Reagan. You wouldn't want to fly through any skies these guys controlled, because they seem utterly unprofessional and forever on the teetery edge of a nervous breakdown. You wouldn't trust them to push a broom through the terminal.
"Pushing Tin" is rated R for profanity and sex and intense encounters between large airplanes in a very small sky. Run time: 123 minutes.
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