Monthly Archives: December 2016

  • Sully:  Miracle on the Hudson

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (2016)

    On 15 January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport en route for Charlotte, North Carolina.  Three minutes into the flight, both engines of the plane – an Airbus A320 – were disabled, the result of a collision with a flock of Canada geese.   The chief pilot, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, judged that he lacked the engine power either to return to LaGuardia or to make a landing at nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.   Sully therefore decided to try to land the plane on the Hudson River.  With the help of New York City emergency services, the plane’s crew was able to evacuate all on board without loss of life or serious injury.   After nearly thirty years as a commercial pilot with US Airways and a few days short of his fifty-eighth birthday, Chesley Sullenberger III instantly became a press and public hero.

    One good thing about Sully: Miracle on the Hudson is that it may help me remember Sully’s real name when it comes up in a general knowledge quiz, instead of mumbling, ‘It’s something like Wesley Cheeseburger’.  Clint Eastwood’s film is essentially a tribute to the heroism and altruism of Sully, his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles and the NYC emergency services.  Eastwood and his screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, are well aware that this benign intention does not a feature-length drama make, even with the help of the almost unavoidably exciting water landing.  They therefore devote a good deal of screen time to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s investigation into what happened and, in particular, whether Sully could have landed without undue risk at LaGuardia or Teterboro.  This inquiry isn’t an invention but the NTSB has criticised the film’s misrepresentation of its investigators.  The director and the star, Tom Hanks (who plays Sully), have made rather different comments on this aspect of the story, according to an Associated Press article of September 2016[1]:

    “Until I read the script, I didn’t know the investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he [Sullenberger] had done the wrong thing. They were kind of railroading him into ‘it was his fault,'” Eastwood said in a publicity video for the Warner Bros. film.

    Hanks told The Associated Press in an interview that a draft script included the names of real-life NTSB officials, but Sullenberger — who is an adviser on the film — requested they be taken out.

    “He said, ‘These are people who are not prosecutors. They are doing a very important job, and if, for editorial purposes, we want to make it more of a prosecutorial process, it ain’t fair to them,'” said Hanks. “That’s an easy thing to change.”

    The controversy it’s caused does little to disguise the blandness of Sully (the controversy may not have harmed its box-office takings, however  – already nearly four times the $60m budget).  As is customary in transport dramas, we’re briefly introduced to a selection of the passengers before they board.  The fact that everyone got out of this plane alive makes that easier to take than usual.  (At the end of the film, some of the real passengers on US Airways Flight 1549 appear on screen, identifying themselves by their seat numbers.)  It’s possible that the recentness of Flight (2012) influenced the structure of Sully:  even though Robert Zemeckis’s movie was fictional, Clint Eastwood may have felt the overlap of subject matter and dramatic highlights in the two stories was enough to warrant juggling the order of main events.  Whatever his reasons, Eastwood gets into the NTSB inquiry too soon and to counterproductive effect.  The reconstruction of the flight itself is highly competent action movie-making (the editing is by Blu Murray) but, by the time it arrives (halfway through the film), it’s shadowed by the investigation and what we already know are the key issues being examined by the NTSB.  Nor is the reconstruction particularly revealing of what actually went on in the cockpit.  We’re never in any doubt that Sully’s actions were well meant, that he believed his decision was the only right decision in the circumstances.

    The film begins with a plane crashing into New York skyscrapers.  This turns out to be Sully’s nightmare of what could have happened although the images inevitably evoke 9/11 in the viewer’s mind.  Later on, there are a couple of flashbacks to seminal moments from earlier in the protagonist’s flying career and we learn that Sully combines his job as a commercial pilot with work as an expert adviser on flight safety to various bodies.   All these things feel perfunctory and extraneous to the central NTSB investigation, with which Clint Eastwood is so preoccupied that he doesn’t make clear when it’s taking place.  There are phone conversations between Sully and his wife (Laura Linney) in the immediate aftermath of the Hudson landing, as well as after rumours emerging from the NTSB investigation are threatening to sully Sully’s heroism.  Since we never see the couple together, it’s almost as if he wasn’t allowed home until he’d cleared his name.  (The NTSB published its report some sixteen months after the incident occurred.)

    The playing as well as the writing of the NTSB panellists is obvious:  Mike O’Malley, Anna Gunn and, to a lesser extent, Jamey Sheridan exude, from the word go, censorious appetite – they have the look of people whose sole function in the story is to be made to eat crow in due course.  The supposed climax to the film is the public hearing, at which the panel’s rulebook small-mindedness is already struggling against the arguments made by Sully and Skiles (Aaron Eckhart).  The computer simulations run for the NTSB, which at first suggest there was time to return to LaGuardia, tell a different story when the intelligent human factor is taken into account.  (In other words, Sully could have had time only if he’d reacted automatically rather than as the result of swift but considered decision-making.)  Then a crucial piece of evidence arrives on cue:  analysis of one of the Airbus’s engines, now recovered from the Hudson, confirms that, as Sully insisted, the engine had been entirely disabled by the bird strike.  When the pilots are vindicated, Anna Gunn’s character turns suddenly smiley and sympathetic.  It’s hard to tell whether this is meant to reflect despicable swimming with the tide or to prove she’s a-nice-person-really.

    The consummate professional Sully is played by an actor to match:  Tom Hanks, not for the first time, skilfully deflates speeches that, in the wrong acting hands and mouth, could sound hopelessly pompous.  Hanks doesn’t show too much variety, though:  Sully looks like a man something’s eating at even before the fateful take-off from LaGuardia (there are no clues to what that something might be).   Hanks’s reaction to the news that all passengers and crew have been safely evacuated is wonderful and affecting but having him play a humane, modest but quietly determined hero is very predictable.  He was much more interesting playing a personally less sympathetic captain in Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips.  Aaron Eckhart gives good support although you sense that he’s straining at the leash to be able to do more than the writing of the role of Jeff Skiles allows.  As Mrs Sully, Laura Linney manages to inject an amazing degree of real feeling into the few and standard lines she’s required to deliver.

    7 December 2016

    [1] http://tinyurl.com/hh29lu7

     

  • The Unknown Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La Fille inconnue  

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2016)

    Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) is a young general practitioner working in Seraing, near Liège (the Dardenne brothers’ home turf and the usual setting for their films).  When the buzzer on the entrance to the surgery sounds, well after the end of normal opening hours, Jenny tells her medical student intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) not to answer.  The next day, as she arrives for work, Jenny learns from the police that the body of a young woman has been discovered on the banks of the nearby River Meuse.  The police ask to look at the health centre’s CCTV to see if it shows anything useful to them.  Jenny readily agrees.  The dead girl, who hasn’t been identified, turns out to be the person whose call the previous evening was ignored.  The CCTV footage lasts only a matter of seconds but shows that the girl (Ange-Déborah Goulehi), as she tried to gain entry to the health centre, was in a greatly agitated state.

    The first twenty or so minutes of The Unknown Girl characterise and contextualise Jenny Davin very well.  She’s businesslike to the point of brusqueness but essentially compassionate and extremely hard-working.  The decision she took in the film’s opening scene was misleading insofar as Jenny appears to be on call day and night.  There are eloquent illustrations of the various difficulties faced by her patients.  An immigrant (Kamil Alisultanov) has resisted going to hospital for fear of being required to produce his passport; his leg wound is now much more serious as a result.   A seriously overweight elderly man (Jean-Michel Balthazar), suffering from diabetes and foot sores, has no heating in his apartment because of problems with a budgeted meter; Jenny phones social services on his behalf to get this sorted out.  She herself lives a solitary and somewhat Spartan existence, and the degree of her professional commitment makes this credible in both respects.  Her meals are as basic as her wardrobe.  She allows herself an occasional, stress-relieving cigarette, smoked through an open window.  The evidence of her strong sense of responsibility to others makes Jenny’s distress about failing to respond to the girl’s call at the surgery very believable.  To make matters worse, she tells the police, she instructed the intern not to answer the door only because she wanted to exert her authority.  (It was clear from the exchange between Jenny and Julien at the start that his mixture of taciturnity and lack of initiative was vexing her.)  The detectives (Ben Hamidou and Laurent Caron) assure Jenny she has no reason to blame herself, but to no avail – she’s thoroughly shaken up.  She was about to start work with what appears to be a larger and better-resourced medical practice but decides to pull out of the new job.

    The continuing anonymity of the dead girl is all too believable as well.  The Dardennes use it to make a political point and they do so effectively.  The Unknown Girl starts to go wrong as the writer-directors expand their communitarian message:  the result is a story that is immediately absorbing but increasingly implausible.  There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for the professional doctor to turn amateur sleuth but this is what happens.  Jenny, impelled by remorse for ignoring the unknown girl, resolves to find out who she was and how she died.   The Dardennes’ gritty naturalism makes matter worse.  If we weren’t so convinced by Jenny’s personality and situation in the early stages, it mightn’t be so hard to accept her in the basically conventional whodunit (and who got dun) plot that develops.  Adèle Haenel inhabits her role so thoroughly that we always believe in Jenny as a real person.  That reality exposes the growing improbability of her behaviour.

    We can accept (just about) that Jenny would be so affected by what’s happened that she buys a cemetery plot in which the dead girl can be buried if no family members come forward to claim her body.  We can’t accept that so conscientious a person as Jenny would exploit her medical position to play detective.  An examination of one of her patients, the teenage Bryan (Louka Minnella), is, in effect, the starting point in the process of solving the mystery.  From then on, Jenny keeps pushing Bryan and subsequently his father (Jérémie Renier) to tell her what they know.  It makes no sense either that Jenny would fail to keep the police – whom she recognises as colleagues to the extent that they too provide a social service – up to speed with much of what she’s finding out.  A visit she makes to a cyber-café, for example, yields important information that has no implications for patient confidentiality but which Jenny keeps to herself until very late in the day.  No wonder the real detectives get pissed off with her.

    Jenny’s persistence eventually leads both Bryan’s father and the cyber-café cashier (Nadège Ouedraogo), who turns out to be the dead girl’s sister, to own up to, respectively, what they’ve done and who they are.  (Reluctance to do so is, in both cases, very understandable.)  This seems meant to confirm the social responsibility theme but the effect is weak – partly because these two individuals’ relationships to the title character are too particular, partly because most viewers will by now have lost belief in The Unknown Girl as a social document.  Even at 106 minutes, it feels padded:  a subplot involving Julien’s decision to abandon his medical career and Jenny’s successful attempts to change his mind feels, in the world of the Dardennes that we’ve come to know, anomalous in its neatness.  In spite of all this, the film is well worth seeing.  The acting is excellent throughout:  Adèle Haenel, working with the Dardennes for the time, gets good support from regulars in their films – notably Olivier Gourmet, Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione.  Gourmet has a startling outburst of anger as a man rattled by Jenny’s snooping.  Renier defines the changing moods of Bryan’s father sharply and strongly.  At a reception held for Jenny to welcome her into the new job she doesn’t take up, Rongione has a good affable tenseness as the senior doctor in the practice.   The Dardennes demonstrate again that doing without music in a film is not only possible but can be dramatically fortifying.  The orchestration of doorbells, buzzers and phone ringtones is an expressive and sufficient soundtrack to The Unknown Girl.

    5 December 2016

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