Review: Sully

"I'm just a man who was doing his job," Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger says in Sully, Clint Eastwood's 35th feature as a director. That statement is a distillation of Eastwood himself - unpretentious and professional, solid and reliable, a hard worker but humble in his achievements. It's not too difficult to understand Eastwood's attraction to the remarkable story of the man behind the so-named "Miracle on the Hudson."

"Miracle on the Hudson" sounds like a film Frank Capra would have happily made during his career. Sully's tale both celebrates the working class man and questions the validity of his efforts. Everyday people are ready to believe in heroes, but those in authority - the media in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the government in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the National Transportation Safety Board in Sully - favour skepticism and cynicism to simply accept that someone might do good, do right or do the best they could do during the circumstances. If Sully is old-fashioned, it is in its earnestness but that sincerity is also its greatest asset.

It could be argued that no city was ready to believe more in heroes and miracles than New York. Sully delivered just that when, after a birdstrike resulted dual-engine failure two minutes after taking off from LaGuardia Airport, he and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) landed U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the middle of the Hudson River on January 15, 2009. The indelible image of the passengers (all 155 survived) standing on the wings of the gradually sinking plane dominated the media outlets. They hail him as a hero as do cabdrivers, bartenders and various people on the street. So does the media - he, Jeff and other members of the flight crew do the rounds - but Sully is clearly a man uncomfortable in the spotlight.

His unease is exacerbated by the probings of the National Transportation Safety Board, who want to understand the logic of his decision when all their algorithms and simulations prove that he could have either turned back to LaGuardia or made a successful landing at nearby Teterboro Airport. They argue that by overriding protocol and executing a forced water landing, Sully actually endangered the lives of those on board. For a man who has safely delivered millions of passengers for over 40 years, their assessment could not only cost him his career but, perhaps more importantly, the looping self-doubt that he might have done the wrong thing.

Sully doesn't exactly dig too deeply into its protagonist's psyche or cast too much doubt in his actions. It doesn't necessarily need to when the circumstances and their constant dissection are already so riveting, which is why the telephone exchanges between Sully and his wife (Laura Linney) and the albeit slight spotlighting of certain passengers for added emotional ballast feel like unnecessary intrusions. Eastwood stocks his film with an array of excellent character actors - Anna Gunn, Mike O'Malley, Jamey Sheridan, Holt McCallany, and Chris Bauer - and they offer fine if almost anonymous support. Eckhart has a little more to work with, providing welcome moments of levity.

That Hanks is superb and tremendously affecting should come as no surprise, but it is noteworthy how well he's maintained this level of quality for so many decades when many of his peers have either phoned it in or dropped off the radar. The real standout, however, is Todd Komarnicki who based his screenplay on Sully and Jeffrey Zaslow's Highest Duty. Komarnicki's script has its faults but its Rashomon-like core - the multiple perspectives from which those 208 seconds are viewed - is utterly compelling. Eastwood and his team - cinematographer Tom Stern, editor Blu Murray, and all those responsible for the sound design - render each recounting with subtle but significant changes in rhythm and tone and somehow manage to make the incident unsettling and suspenseful each time.

"I'm just a man who was doing his job," Sully insists when most around him label him as a hero. Sully and Eastwood understand that he wasn't the only one doing his job on that fateful day. There was Jeff, there was the flight crew, those at departure control, the ferryboat captains, the scuba team, the choppers, the paramedics, even the passengers themselves, who helped one another. It was the best of New York, the best of people coming together. Perhaps it's corny, perhaps it's a bit too rah-rah, but what's wrong with believing in miracles and in the good of ordinary people?

Sully

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Written by: Todd Komarnicki; based on Highest Duty by Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow

Starring: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Anna Gunn, Mike O'Malley, Jamey Sheridan, Chris Bauer, Holt McCallany, Jeff Kober, Autumn Reeser, Valerie Mahaffey, Molly Hagan, Sam Huntington, Max Adler