If you could somehow overlook the crazy-grandpa political asides that pop up so frequently during Clint Eastwood’s interviews and public appearances, Sully might make you wonder if he has gone soft. In many ways, his latest film—his 35th as a director—seems more in line with Frank Capra’s upbeat reassurances about human decency and the rewards of duty than Eastwood’s own, considerably darker examinations of macho heroism. It stands in sharp contrast to the decidedly bleaker and more troubling American Sniper, and even if it’s not wholly successful, Sully is Eastwood’s best film in years.
Right off the runway, it faces a pair of daunting obstacles that it only overcomes about half the time: Not only must Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki build a feature out of what boils down to 208 seconds, but they’re also trying to inject tension and suspense into an event that we all know turned out fine. There is, after all, a reason that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s 2009 emergency water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 is known as “the miracle on the Hudson.”
The success of Sully, then, largely begins and ends with its casting. There was probably some sort of cosmic law preventing anyone but Tom Hanks from being cast as Sullenberger, and his charisma carries the film when it’s at its thinnest. Sully stretches out its plot with a twisting chronological structure that loops back to the masterfully staged crash over and over again, rendering it each time from a slightly different perspective.
Eastwood gets right down to business, opening the film with what seems like a recreation of the crash. The scene takes a horrific turn, though, and it’s revealed to be a nightmare—a device that Eastwood will use time and again throughout the movie, which focuses on the investigation that follows the crash and the psychological toll it takes on its hero.
At first Sully is sure he made the right call—that there was no way he could have safely made it to an airport after a bird collision disabled both engines of his plane, forcing him to attempt an unprecedented “forced water landing” on the Hudson River. But the airline and the National Transportation Safety Board aren’t so sure, and an investigation soon turns up evidence that casts doubt on Sully’s judgment: multiple computer simulations indicate that he could have safely landed the plane at a nearby airport.
Much of the movie is dedicated to Sully and First Officer Jeff Skiles (a winning and prodigiously mustached Aaron Eckhart) defending their actions to a squad of cartoonishly hostile, thinly drawn investigators. There’s a troubling double standard at work here that makes the movie feel disingenuous at times—Sully and his crew are exalted for doing their jobs, but the NTSB investigators are excoriated for doing theirs. Duty, it seems, isn’t quite so honorable when it’s motivating government officials rather than Eastwood’s stoic heroes.
It’s also a dramatic face-off that’s almost entirely manufactured for the purpose of injecting some bad guys into a story that neither has nor needs any. There’s plenty of drama in Sully’s more personal reckonings with the fallout of the crash, and in the possibility that he unnecessarily endangered the lives of the 155 aboard the plane. Besides what it would do to him psychologically, such an outcome could be financially devastating for the pilot and his family—the film is pointedly set in the wake of the 2008 recession, and the investigation threatens to put Sully on the brink of financial disaster. His story hardly needs sneering government goons to raise the stakes.
Fortunately, other aspects of the movie are considerably more graceful. In no small part, Sully is a film about the monolithic shadow of 9/11, and it’s at its best when it pulls back to contextualize its hero’s feat as a city’s triumph. Hanks and his performance might be the main attraction here, but he isn’t even on screen during some of its most memorable moments, such as the quietly devastating shots of New Yorkers watching the crippled plane hurtling over streets and past office windows, or its elegantly choreographed scenes of emergency responders making their way to the crash site. Eastwood is ham-fisted at times but he can also be remarkably artful, and there are enough of these grace notes to make Sully a worthwhile experience.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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