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‘Sully’ refuses to spread its wings
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IN “Sully,” Clint Eastwood’s haunted and sterile docudrama of Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s 2009 landing of Flight 1549 on the Hudson, Eastwood has drained away all the superficial, rah-rah heroism of Sullenberger’s great feat, but he has also sucked the life out of it.
“Sully” is every bit an Eastwood picture. Instead of the rush of euphoria that the “Miracle on the Hudson” swept through a New York accustomed to only tragedy from the air, we get a weary parable that, as Eastwood has often done, pulls the curtain away from a celebrated public figure and reveals the inner trauma and sense of responsibility that lies inside a regular man thrust into an unwanted spotlight.
Sullenberger, played with typical dignity and sensitivity by Tom Hanks, is not celebrated here with a parade of a movie. He is beset by demons and anxieties, and the almost comically harsh scrutiny of an aviation safety panel, which, relying on automated flight simulations, believes Sullenberger could have safely returned to LaGuardia or made it over the New Jersey shoreline to Teterboro.
Their snide, judgmental presence is there throughout “Sully,” as they try to second guess his decision-making. It’s an exaggeration. The film’s climactic grilling of Sullenberger at a public hearing was referred to in news reports as “gentle, respectful and at times downright congenial.”
But Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki working off of Sullenberger’s book “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters,” had to find drama somewhere. The entire flight lasted less than six minutes. It was just 208 seconds from bird strike to the frigid Hudson.
How do you make a film out of mere moments, handled with preternatural calm? Eastwood lingers in its aftermath, as Sully remains holed in a Manhattan he has little love for. The narrative is fractured, flashing backward and forward, into the pilot’s past and occasionally into his nightmares.
“Sully” remains, stubbornly, a refraction of Sullenberger’s interior, as filtered through Eastwood’s elegiac lens. “I eyeballed it,” is how the pilot explains his intuitive response, built up over 42 years of flying. It’s not hard to feel Eastwood’s own identification with the man. He, too, is an old hand who works quickly: workmanlike and instinctually, “eyeballing” it. You can imagine Eastwood, too, up there on the stand responding to what computers say he should have done differently.
In testimony, Sullenberger criticizes the simulators for “taking all the humanity of the cockpit.” Eastwood has put it back in. But the story of Flight 1549 was bigger than that.
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