Flyboys (2006)

Flyboys arrives with the solemn bearing of a picture that believes it has something to say about courage, then spends two hours saying it about airplanes. Tony Bill, a pilot himself, fills the frame with Nieuports banking through flak and young men in leather helmets squinting at the horizon. James Franco plays a Texan whose family ranch is being foreclosed, which is as close as the screenplay comes to a political thought. The rest is dogfights, a French girl named Lucienne, and a German ace in a black Fokker who salutes before flying away. The year is 2006. The film is 1930 in its bones.

The cast is white and male to a man, with a single exception. Abdul Salis plays Eugene Skinner, a boxer who found acceptance in France as an athlete and was later kept from flying by his own army because of his race. The film states this plainly, then moves along. That is the whole of its social accounting. Lucienne exists to be loved and, in the final act, to be rescued from a village the Germans have entered. She is wounded in transit and serves as the occasion for a medal. Nobody in this squadron has an inner life the war has not already assigned him.

What the film does not contain is nearly as instructive as what it does. There is no environmental conscience, no economic grievance beyond one foreclosure, no interest in the body except as a thing that can be shot or amputated. Jensen breaks down after a battle and cannot fly again. The screenplay treats this as shell shock, full stop, and never reaches for a diagnostic vocabulary. The historical errors are plentiful and entirely innocent of ideology: wrong helmets, wrong engines, the wrong squadron entirely for the real Eugene Bullard. Sloppy, not seditious. It lectures exactly once, near the end, when Skinner is barred from the air at home, and even that lands softly. A film of modest ambitions and fewer convictions, which is its own kind of honesty.