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