To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment April 23, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/04/23/pushing_tin Fly boys John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton play cowboys and Indians in the air traffic control comedy "Pushing Tin." - - - - - - - - - - - - By Stephanie Zacharek "Pushing Tin" isn't just about air-traffic controllers; it's a movie that might have been made by one. Just as his characters work at a nerve-shredding job that requires them to guide a bedeviling number of planes through airspace without mishap, director Mike Newell ("Donnie Brasco") keeps spinning out eccentric story threads, crisscrossing them, sending them soaring, allowing them to land gracefully or with a bump -- but never do they collide or explode in his face. This isn't what you'd call an orderly movie: The plot sometimes meanders into strange places you'd rather it wouldn't. One of the picture's most appealing characters disappears into thin air far too early (the screenwriter's equivalent of the Devil's Triangle?). The ending has an easy, hang-gliding charm, but it also feels grafted on -- it gives the movie a slightly facile sheen, wrapping it up so neatly that some of the story's earlier subtleties seem canceled out. But "Pushing Tin" works so beautifully from scene to scene -- urged along by crisp dialogue (the screenplay was written by Glen Charles and Les Charles, the guys behind "Cheers") and the actors' unerring timing -- that it's almost always a pleasure to watch. "Pushing Tin" is, essentially, a western: The hotshot young controller Nick (John Cusack) gets his cage, and his confidence, rattled by threatening newcomer Russell (Billy Bob Thornton), whose Zenlike composure can't be cracked. Newell riffs on all the stock issues of manly self-esteem and competition. Nick is crushed (and does his best to hide it) when Russell effortlessly breaks his record shooting baskets at a barbecue get-together; when Russell, fly-fishing in a mountain stream, throws a plump fish back, his deadpan rationale to Nick is, "He knows I caught him and I know I caught him." Newell understands machismo -- all men like to show off, but what they fear most is a rival who shows them up without breaking a sweat, especially in front of the womenfolk -- but he's even more interested in mischievously deflating it. His touch is so light, it's almost feminine, and that's the weird tension that keeps "Pushing Tin" spinning. Newell sets the tone early on with a dry epigraph, a quote from a real-life air-traffic controller: "You land a million planes safely, and then you have one little midair and you never hear the end of it." Nick and his pals, a group of conscientious, well-meaning buffoons with nerves of (they hope) steel, work in a boxy, nondescript building that houses the entity known as Tracon, which stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control. Each controller sits in front of a "scope," wearing a headset that allows him or her to guide planes around one another and to ultimately bring them to a safe landing. The screens, of course, look exactly like video games, but Newell doesn't lean too heavily on the irony -- realizing, perhaps, that it's not an irony at all. The first time you see a controller's nervous face reflected in the scope's screen, it strikes you; after that, the image becomes mundane, a fact of life for the people who do these jobs. An alert sounds when two planes come dangerously close, and a clutch of well-meaning controllers gather around the operator in control, offering helpful advice whether it's needed or not. Occasionally, someone mentions that lives are at stake, but not very often. The gravity of the controllers' job is written all over them in more subtle tones: in the way they crack absurd, blasé jokes right after a disaster is averted (which seems to happen an ungodly number of times every day), or the way they keep their dark glasses on when they gather after work for a beer and some mild flirtations in a local bar, as if they know that the tense, wild look we see in their eyes as they stare at their scopes may not have yet dissipated. It's a fact of life that they might eventually crack up or even commit suicide. When the guys get together socially for a barbecue (only one of the controllers is a woman), one of the wives remarks on how much money her husband brought home the previous year: "Even after we put money away for college and Ed's upcoming breakdown, it's a big hunk of change." Nick seems to hold up pretty well: He's the kind of controller who's poised enough to idly croon corny love songs in between pattering with airplane pilots. He takes pride in marching clusters of airplanes through grimly tight maneuvers. "I got 'em lined up like Rockettes!" he brags, eyeing a screenful of neatly arranged little arrows. At the end of his shift, he goes home to his nondescript little suburban house and his vaguely frustrated but devoted wife, Connie (Cate Blanchett), a slim Long Island beauty whose chenille sweaters and tight jeans are just a little bit townie, but whose clear blue eyes betray her inner composure and sophistication. When Thornton's Russell Bell arrives -- part Choctaw Indian, part legend, he explains his unflappability on the job by saying, "I just move the blips around so they don't hit each other and then I go home" -- he challenges Nick's reputation as the coolest and best controller. But the hairiest and tensest scenes take place outside their oppressive work bunker: Nick fights a hopeless attraction to Russell's curvy young gothabilly wife, Mary (Angelina Jolie), that threatens to unravel his marriage -- although Newell makes sure nothing is as simple as all that. Nick's brain, beset by insecurity and paranoia, is the battleground here, the site of the big showdown. His troubles can't be explained away by a mere job, no matter how intense it is. Part of what makes "Pushing Tin" so pleasurable is the way its four major players -- Cusack, Thornton, Blanchett and Jolie -- work the tension that pulls their characters together and pushes them apart. Individually and as part of the ensemble, each knows when to yank tight and when to give the line some play. Just the way Thornton sets his jaw tells you he's one of those guys who's so laid back he's wily. When he drags his own personal folding chair over to his scope and sits down -- the rest of the guys have modern chairs on rollers -- you don't need to notice the lucky feather sticking out of his hair (though you can't miss it) to recognize that his bottomless inner calm is really just a particularly annoying brand of insanity. In her all-too-brief role as the lusciously imbalanced Mary, Jolie uses her ripe features and odd little mannerisms to build a believable and surprisingly charming character. When Nick comes upon her crying in the supermarket, a couple of jugs of vodka plunked visibly in her cart, her lips seem even more swollen than her tear-smudged charcoal-rimmed eyes. Later, as she and Nick flirt with each other over too many drinks, she drags her finger idly along her lower lip, absently nibbling it now and then. It's the kind of gesture calculated to drive men wild, and Jolie the actress effortlessly telegraphs that Mary the character knows it -- and can't help herself. "Pushing Tin" takes a fairly sophisticated view of commitment and infidelity: It doesn't try to reduce a marriage's troubles to the vagaries of one cheating partner. And maybe even more important, it may poke fun at its middle-class characters, but it never condescends to them. Blanchett looks completely at home in her slightly big hair, but the intensity of her gaze dares you to laugh at her. Just when you think she's ready to play the vulnerable, needy one, she fixes Nick with those eyes and tells him that the troubles they've faced in their marriage have messed him up more than they have her, and she's right. John Cusack has always been such an intuitive actor that I've never feared he'd try to coast on his boyish charm as he aged, and he hasn't. He's one of those exceedingly subtle (and rare) actors who can play a regular guy without laying his "everymanness" on too thick. A movie isn't a social studies lesson. Cusack can shape a character without ever falling back on the stock tricks -- especially the dreaded dem, dese and dose accent -- because he doesn't need them. There's never any question that Nick's limited education has any bearing on his smarts -- Cusack makes sure we see the intelligence flickering in those startlingly alert eyes. Cusack's Nick understands that it's OK, maybe good, for a man to show his feelings, but if the best you can do is to show them only for a fraction of a second, that counts, too. Disappointment, pain wrapped up tight like a boxer's fist, miniature fears that threaten to blossom into mighty ones: Cusack plays every masculine emotion with an almost feminine openness. But what makes that openness work is that he never bears down on it -- it's always so fleeting that if you're not watching his face every second, you might miss it. It's a feat few contemporary young actors could pull off, but Cusack has no trouble. He really is the fastest gun in the West. salon.com | April 23, 1999