Sully (2016)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
On 15 January 2009, the world witnessed the 'Miracle on the Hudson' when Captain 'Sully' Sullenberger glided his disabled plane onto the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 souls aboard. However, even as Sully was being heralded by the public and the media for his unprecedented feat of aviation skill, an investigation was unfolding that threatened to destroy his reputation and career.
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The movie “Sully” reminded me the most of was another true-life airline drama “United 93,” which chronicled the doomed flight that crashed in Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.
So while the crash landing sequence will grip audiences, it doesn’t have the stamina to match other plane-drama films such as Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (still a masterpiece).
Even Paul Greengrass in his now forgotten United 93 (about the 9/11 hijacking of the plane that, headed for the Pentagon, crashed in Shanksville, Pa.) trivialized the experience in a hackneyed pretense of commemoration.
(It is in some ways the mirror image of Paul Greengrass’s heartfelt, harrowing United 93 .)
Eastwood wants to sensationalize the event by depicting Sully as something of a guilt ridden everyman, while also anxiously trying to film every event with a stark reality in the vein of “United 93.”
This results in some tense and sleepless nights for Sully but, dramatically speaking, the story is the inverse of that of the 2012 aviation drama Flight, in which Denzel Washington's pilot may have saved the day but had some personal issues eminently worthy of the inquiry board's attention.
This isn’t Flight, the Robert Zemeckis film in which Denzel Washington played a self-sabotaging top-notch commercial pilot who, after landing a plane in scarier circumstances than Sully faced, turns out to be concealing a chronic alcohol and drug problem.
“Sully” recalls 2012’s fictional drama “Flight,” which is like the dark, nightmare version of Sullenberger’s incident.
The unsettling dream sequence is strangely less exciting than such airline-disaster openings as those in “Flight” and “Alive.”
This isn’t Flight, after all.
Sully is foremost about control, harkening back to Howard Hawks films like Only Angels Have Wings in its exploration and admiration of the complexities of duty.
A movie about the emergency landing of a US Airways passenger jet on New York’s Hudson River by pilot Chesley Sullenberger in 2009 could have been merely banal, like a fact-based, action-oriented remake of those 1970s Airport disaster movies.
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While only a dream sequence, “Sully’s” opening feels less like a stunt from a director who alternates between sober, seemingly timeless portraits of exceptional personalities (“American Sniper,” “Million Dollar Baby”), and corny, cardboard melodramas too old-fashioned in their approach (“Jersey Boys,” “Changeling”), occasionally landing somewhere in the middle (à la “Flags of Our Fathers”).
The second smash-cut flashback, in which the sight of a military plane on the Intrepid Air and Space Museum wrenches Sully thirty years back in time, recalls the use of a similar technique in Eastwood’s American Sniper—another portrait of a designated national hero who has to struggle through PTSD symptoms, adapted from the subject’s self-penned book.
One need only look as far back as Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, and American Sniper to realize that a strong sense of honesty and responsibility almost always forms the foundation of his lead characters.
Indeed, the 86-year old director seems invested and energized by this material (based on Sullenberger's memoir), maybe even more so than 2014's American Sniper.
When not being trotted out for media appearances or questioned by the National Transportation Safety Board, Sully’s stewing in his own self-doubt and the film follows in the footsteps of Eastwood’s American Sniper as the story of a public hero’s private PTSD.
To see an example of what I’m suggesting, revisit David Lynch’s film The Straight Story: Notice how the film’s most disturbing moment comes when a Vietnam veteran (played so beautifully by Richard Farnsworth) suffers a flashback, and all we see is a haunted man staring into a void that only he can see.
Hanks is demonstrably better than this material: if only he had a Hitchcock around so Hanks could make his Vertigo instead of a dutiful product that plays like a 1980s TV “Movie of the Week” somehow elevated to A-list Oscar bait (and shot almost entirely with Digital IMAX cameras).
It's not that Eastwood is going all Tarantino on us (like "Pulp Fiction"), but there is some jumping around in time.
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This is the most affecting portrait of Americans at work since Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.
While only a dream sequence, “Sully’s” opening feels less like a stunt from a director who alternates between sober, seemingly timeless portraits of exceptional personalities (“American Sniper,” “Million Dollar Baby”), and corny, cardboard melodramas too old-fashioned in their approach (“Jersey Boys,” “Changeling”), occasionally landing somewhere in the middle (à la “Flags of Our Fathers”).
Sully fits nicely alongside Eastwood’s recent run of films showing the process whereby images and narratives of heroism and romantic longing are manufactured and marketed, something which runs through such otherwise disparate works as Flags, Invictus, J. Edgar, and Jersey Boys—though the same preoccupation can be found functioning much further back in Eastwood’s corpus, in titles like White Hunter Black Heart, Bronco Billy, or even directorial debut Play Misty for Me, a thriller set into motion by a woman’s inability to separate a nighttime DJ’s smooth line of on-air bullshit from the flesh-and-blood man.
Like his previous lackluster effort, Jersey Boys, Eastwood fails to capture the spirit that undoubtedly inspired his interest in the project.
Clint Eastwood (four-time Oscar-winner and all-round US national treasure) directed, co-produced and wrote and performed the main musical theme for this true tale shortly after completing American Sniper and Jersey Boys, and that’s quite an achievement, given that he recently turned 86, an age when many of us would have trouble getting to the movies, let alone actually making one (or three).
When he directed Jersey Boys (2014), it was a surprise.
Director Clint Eastwood is interested in how characters, particularly men, cope with celebrity or notoriety and their shadow of their own defining deeds; the closest parallel is Flags of Our Fathers , but similar thematic material can be found in Unforgiven, Gran Torino, American Sniper and even Jersey Boys.