On numerous occasions when we expect the plot to zig into the schmaltzy and tried - and - true, it zags instead into cynical, feet - of - clay melodrama, such as when Whitaker shows up
at the
funeral for a flight
attendant / lover and asks another flight
attendant (Tamara Tunie) to lie for him.
He told him his uncle Ed Alison had gone up to the preacher after the
funeral was said and shook his hand, the two of them standing there holding onto their hats and leaning thirty degrees into the wind like vaudeville comics while the canvas flapped and raged about them and the
funeral attendants raced over the grounds after the lawnchairs, and he'd leaned into the preacher's face and screamed
at him that it was a good thing they'd held the burial that morning because the way it was making up this thing could turn off into a real blow before the day was out.