Sully

Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's entire life is likely to be defined by a single decision. On Jan. 15, 2009, after geese were sucked into the engines of the Airbus jetliner he was piloting, Sully landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. While five people on board were seriously injured, no one died.

It was called the most successful ditching in aviation history; then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it "the miracle on the Hudson." A movie was inevitable. Maybe we're lucky Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks were there to direct and star in the film.

Like Sully (Tom Hanks), Eastwood has plenty of experience and manages to guide the film through some tricky skies. The director has an aversion to blasts of manipulative music and adding dramatic emphasis. He correctly figures that a disabled aircraft is scary enough and makes terrific use of the Imax format, putting viewers on the doomed plane with Hanks.

While Flight 1549 was inherently dramatic, the in-flight ordeal lasted a mere 208 seconds. This makes the decisions from Sully and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) seem even more impressive because they didn't have long to make choices that affected hundreds of lives, but it's hard to build a feature from the incident.

Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki (working from the book Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters by Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow) instead focus on the National Transportation Safety Board investigation that followed the accident. While a quick Google search reveals that Sully and Skiles passed, the film indicates Sully's canonization wasn't assured.

Computer simulations and onboard instruments indicated that only one of the plane's two engines had gone out, suggesting he could have safely landed the plane at a nearby airport instead of the Hudson.

The investigators, especially Dr. Elizabeth Davis (Anna Gunn from Breaking Bad) and Charles Porter (Mike O'Malley), almost seem determined to pin the mishap on the pilot. The showdown between the regulators and the veteran pilot might seem a little one-sided, but Sully isn't totally sure that he did everything right during the fateful minute. His training and his instincts say yes, but his nightmares say no. At a certain point he has trouble telling if his expertise or his ego is in charge.

If it's the latter, the new consulting business he wants to start won't get off the ground (who wants to hire a safety guru who needlessly landed his plane in the drink?), and he may be justly denied the chance to ever set foot in a cockpit again.

By at least entertaining potential doubts, Eastwood and Komarnicki give Sully some dramatic weight when the Airbus isn't in flight. They also introduce viewers to a fellow who may not be deserving of bureaucratic scorn, but Sully's equally uncomfortable when people on the street or reporters who aren't aware of what the NTSB knows lionize him. After all, undeserved praise can be as painful as ridicule. Hanks and Eckhart know how to play two men who are justifiably nervous, even if they know they did their best. Hanks can also play guilt and shyness as easily as he can play stoic resolve.

It's a shame the filmmakers couldn't have done more with Laura Linney as Sully's supportive but frustrated wife. The Sullenbergers' relationship could have been an important element in understanding what happened before and after Flight 1549. One wonders if Sully might have behaved differently if he weren't trying to get a business started.

That said, Sully also wisely focuses on the first response team and the flight crew that successfully got Sully and his passengers out of the freezing Hudson before their deaths would have been certain. Sully may be a hero, but it would have been a shame not to acknowledge these first responders as well.

MovieStyle on 09/09/2016