Pushing Tin

John Cusack plays Nick “No Fly Zone” Falzone, a quick-thinking fellow who coaches passenger jets through Manhattan airspace with the best of them. Likable, sexy, charming and sure of himself, Nick thrives in a crucial margin of emotional and mental stability that allows him to perform a task most of us would find terribly daunting. Nick is also married to an attractive if jittery woman Connie (Blanchett) from the city, though one suspects she and their two kids do not occupy his first thoughts every day.

Nick’s cock-of-the-walk routine is disrupted, however, by the arrival of Russell Bell (Thornton), a laconic colleague who transfers to Nick’s department and brings a stoicism, fearlessness, and self-containment that rub our hero the wrong way. And a busty young alcoholic wife Mary (Jolie), whose calm, quiet, Zen-like approach to his job contrasts sharply with Nick’s intense personality. Nick and Russell end up testing each other’s raw nerve on the job, in a speeding car, in an Italian restaurant, and most provocatively in each other’s marriages. He sleeps with Russell’s wife, breaking an unwritten rule in the profession, and systematically loses his wife, his job and his life.

Russell seems oblivious to Nick’s rising jealousy until a spontaneous wrestling match in the middle of a crisis proves that he’s just another alpha male in a battle that can only end with one of them leaving. But it’s not quite clear what drives him to that point, as he even casually brushes aside his wife’s infidelity as a sort of non-issue.

This is a guy’s story, and women don’t really factor into the equation here except as something the men can take from each other. Still, Blanchett is convincingly sympathetic as the high school sweetheart-turned-stay-at-home mom who’s slightly ditzy but still loaded with self-respect, and Jolie comes off as enigmatic and mysterious as her man.

Their jobs—and their lives—are about control, or the lack of it. As his life falls apart around him, Nick is desperate to get it back and thinks Russell has the answer. But the answer’s unspoken. It has to do with jumping into a freezing Colorado River and standing under a landing 747 just to feel its wake. Let’s just hope the inexplicit ending doesn’t lead to a rash of thrill seekers lining airport runways in search of the meaning of life.

Aarti Mahbubani