It’s fitting that “Sully,” the latest film by Clint Eastwood about the “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, has been released on the weekend of 9/11’s 15th Anniversary. The worst happened that day, and we’re lucky to have first responders to celebrate this weekend. But what Sully experiences in Eastwood’s film casts doubt over whether he’s a hero at all, or whether he or all the other “heroes” could’ve done more to save others.
Eastwood’s “Sully” offers a compelling and dramatic story that proves to be a far more shaded and nuanced portrait of heroism than Eastwood’s own blockbuster “American Sniper.” It’s a film about doubt and uncertainty within even the best of us. For those like Sully, we hope that they can overcome their memories of the tragedy and accept the good they’ve done.
In the aftermath of the plane crash in which he and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Ekhart) emergency landed on the Hudson River, Sully (Tom Hanks) imagines what would’ve happened if he failed. In January of 2009, both engines on his plane gave out within seconds of taking off, an ordeal that lasted just 208 seconds. In the end he saved the lives of all 155 “souls” on board. Had he chosen to try and return to the airport, he imagines that he would have not just cost the lives of all those on board, but perhaps hundreds of others in a densely populated Manhattan.
Before we get a glimpse of the actual events on board Sully’s flight, we meet him gearing up for interviews with the press and with the NTSB, and he hallucinates that his plane would come crashing down right in the middle of the city. For New Yorkers to have seen yet another plane flying so low near the city just eight years after 9/11 must’ve been a true shock that Eastwood only alludes to.
But it gives a good insight into Sully’s mind. The NTSB is investigating whether Sully’s choice to land in the river was at fault. They have engineers who say the left engine was still idling and simulations that show he could’ve made it back to several nearby airports safely. They’re looking for human error.
At first Eastwood talks through Sully, ridiculing the NTSB agents as though they were bookish nerds who knew nothing about the real world. Sully talks like a salt of the Earth guy, claiming some “computer” can’t account for the human factor. “Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time,” he says. It’s as if Eastwood is saying, “How dare they hound this guy, this hero!”
But of course it sinks in with Sully and with the audience, and by jumbling the order of the film, Eastwood casts the events of the actual crash into a different light. Sully’s actions aren’t flatly heroic. First Eastwood shows us the crash from the perspective of an air traffic control officer who becomes terrified that he lost them. Then he cuts to the stewardesses who chant a chilling mantra of “Heads down, stay down!” And once the plane has landed, in which it doesn’t crash in a spectacular display but skids on the surface kicking up water, Sully disappears into the background to see how the first responders and all the passengers react.
Many of Eastwood’s films are cast in a bluish and silvery glow, a soothing color palette that highlights the actors above all. And here Hanks gets cast almost entirely shadow as he talks on the phone to his wife (Laura Linney, not given nearly enough to do), or with the camera looking down on him in anything but heroic poses. At one point Sully dreams of Katie Couric on the news exposing him as a fraud, practically taunting him in his sleep. What a nightmare.
It’s a dark story despite its heroic themes, and the film’s climax inside a public NTSB hearing room finds Sully calmly dismantling the board’s case against him. In a short, powerful and never melodramatic monologue it exposes the nature of heroism in the moment, the human factor that a simulation can’t recreate.
Hanks deserves a world of credit. He doesn’t panic, he doesn’t flinch, he lays back in his chair calmly as the NTSB grills him, and yet he moves around the room with authority and looks in control. He toys with his hand while remaining perfectly still on the phone with his wife. His performance does a lot for how much he keeps himself contained and maintains his poise.
Eastwood isn’t about to pretend that maybe Sully isn’t a hero, but he shows us the journey to get there is more complicated than what the press perpetuates. The world can believe you’ve performed a miracle, but first you have to believe it for yourself.
3 ½ stars
Sounds like an Interesting way to portray the hero. I definitely will see this.
eastwood’s been picking apart “heroism”–as well he might, a form of juvenilia that impairs everyone’s eyesight–for a long time now: there’s the mythology, then the so-called “reality” behind it (actually MORE mythology, just one onion layer after another, but i digress …) * the direct opposite, arguably, of john ford’s take on the problem in LIBERTY VALANCE–“print the legend”–which somehow always manages to get a critical pass (or does it?: maybe I’M the one missing the point … or at least the ambiguity of it)
one small nit to pick, brian: that beautiful pale blue cast you mention (which hardly anyone else has bothered to notice) seems more of an outlier in eastwood’s work than anything adopted with regularity * almost all eastwood’s malpaso-produced films are dark and somber, immediately identifiable by the lighting–that deep chiaroscuro you picked up in sully’s call to his wife seems typical–and the predominant colors will usually be earth tones, whatever blues there are veering toward ultramarine end of the spectrum * heroism aside, i do really like this movie–yes, more than AMERICAN SNIPER–and the aqua color scheme, the infinity of sky and water, is a big part of this * it’s probably my favorite eastwood film since HEREAFTER–which, come to think of it, had a lot of blue in it too * ah well, visions of the celestial …