Sully

I think Clint Eastwood has found the perfect tone to bring the story of Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger to the screen.  He does not play up the drama of the situation, and there's never a moment that feels overly dramatized.  Sully feels real.  What I think will surprise most viewers is that its focus is not so much on "the Miracle on the Hudson", when on January 15th, 2009, U.S. Airways Flight 1549 made a spectacular last minute water landing, and everyone on board survived with minor injuries.  This event is kept mostly to an extended flashback halfway through the film.  Instead, Eastwood decides to focus on Sully himself, who piloted the plane, and is not only haunted by the media attention that surrounds him after the incident, but also by what could have happened if he made the slightest wrong decision that day.

Tom Hanks portrays Chesley Sullenberger with a quiet and dignified manner.  This is not a showy performance, and you're not going to get any big dramatic "Oscar clips" out of his performance.  He plays the role the right way - He is unsure and a bit insecure.  He's still traumatized by the event of landing the plane, and everything that could have gone wrong.  His closest confidant is his co-pilot that day, Jeff Stiles (Aaron Eckhart), who knows that Chesley made the right decision that day to land in the Hudson, rather than try and return to LaGuardia Airport and make an emergency landing on the runway after both engines on the plane suddenly went out.  He also keeps in touch with his supportive wife Lorraine (the invaluable Laura Linney, somewhat wasted here in a role that literally has her do nothing but talk on the phone with her husband while making worried faces) whenever he can.  His world has changed so dramatically.  He has to hide out in a hotel, and the news media is covering his landing of the plane on a 24 hour basis on the television.  He's booked to appear on David Letterman for an interview, but he looks uncomfortable in the spotlight.  He looks like he wants to shrink back into the shadows of the backstage. 

Sully is a man who is not used to being the center of attention, and that is where the drama of the film comes from.  The film is about him trying to deal with the fame, and with the investigation going on by government agents from the National Transportation Safety Board.  They've done a computer simulation that shows Sully did have time to make it back to the runway for a proper landing, and that he did not need to land in the middle of the River.  He's being placed under investigation about whether he made the right decision that day, and the result they reach could determine his future.  This only adds to the insecurity he is feeling, as well as the nightmares where he witnesses the landing going much differently and more tragically.  I think Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki made the right decision in focusing on the man behind the story.  Yes, the actual Miracle on the Hudson is eventually covered with eerie second-by-second realism in one of the more thrilling and nail biting sequences to hit the screen this year.  But by focusing mostly on the man, it allows the film for a much smaller and more intimate scope that really works.

Some have criticized Eastwood's approach to telling the story, as he tells it somewhat out of sequence, using flashbacks and fragmented memories to take us back to the actual event.  But I think it works with the kind of story he is trying to tell, which is ultimately about a man second guessing himself.  I can only imagine how many times the actual Sully has gone over that moment in his head.  He's also probably envisioned the same nightmarish scenarios about how it could have gone wrong after the fact.  Eastwood wisely does not play up these gruesome images, but uses them as horrific reminders of how close Sully came to losing the 155 passengers who were on board that day, and how truly miraculous it was that everyone survived.  Everything in this movie has a stark realism to it, from the low key but effective performances, to the subtle music score that knows when to chime in and when not to. (The actual event of the plane's emergency landing has no music whatsoever.)

Sully is a dramatization, but it never feels like one.  There are no moments where we feel like the filmmakers have played up the drama for the sake of punching up the script, and there's nothing that seems like it couldn't have happened the way the movie depicts it.  The government agents who question Sully's decision to land in the Hudson are obviously intended to be the antagonists of the film, but they are not played up as one-note villains.  The questions and assumptions they make are reasonable, and they aren't so set in their beliefs that they are not willing to listen to Sully.  Maybe I appreciated the film's subtle and almost real time approach after sitting through Hands of Stone last weekend.  That was such a forced and clearly overly edited docudrama that it forgot to actually tell us the real story.  It was just a sleek and Hollywood-style run through of the subject's life story, dropping facts, but never really diving into them.  This movie does not have a single artificial moments in it.  When the passengers are off the plane and floating helplessly in the frigid January waters, you can feel the chill they must have felt.

This is a powerful movie that never overplays or feels the need to be important.  The power comes from the story itself, and the man at the center of it all, not from any grandiose scenes.  Its power also comes from the subtle ways the movie gets under our skin and draws us in.  Eastwood could have easily made your standard life story docudrama that chronicled the life of the man leading up to the events on that fateful day.  Instead, he has done something much greater, and has given us an intimate drama that is not only emotional, but extremely thrilling when it needs to be.

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