In ‘Sully,’ heroic pilot Tom Hanks soars again: 3 stars
Clint Eastwood is not a film stylist. No fancy camera angles. No innovative editing. No signature flourishes.
What he is is a terrific and seemingly effortless storyteller, one of the best now making movies.
Exhibit A is “Sully,” Eastwood’s re-creation of 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which a crippled jetliner landed on the Hudson River without losing any of the 155 souls aboard.
Tom Hanks stars as Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the 40-year aviation veteran who, within seconds of losing both engines to a flock of Canada geese, realized a return to LaGuardia Airport was impossible. The only chance of salvation was a water landing.
Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay (based on the memoir by the real Sullenberger) devotes half of the film’s 96-minute running time to the brief flight and the crash itself.
The near-disaster is experienced from several vantage points (pilots and crew, passengers, first responders, witnesses), with each iteration providing new insights and not a few thrills.
This is absorbing, shocking, logic-defying stuff.
Now we all know that nobody died on US Airways Flight 1549. Still, the film generates tension by revealing that National Transportation Safety Board investigators were prepared to pin the blame on Sully and first mate Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart). (The film takes dramatic license by launching the hearings immediately after the incident; in reality, they came 18 months later.)
Computer simulations suggested that the damaged aircraft could have returned to the airport. Did Sully make a bad call that put everyone on board at risk?
Faced with the possibility that he would be immediately demoted from hero to scapegoat, Sully spends several anxious days battling the demons of self-doubt (and imagining a worse-case scenario of his plane taking out a block of downtown Manhattan in a fiery crash).
Should he be found at fault, Sully tells his wife (Laura Linney) by phone, he would lose not only his job but his pension.
“Sully” provides its hero with a couple of flashbacks to reveal his childhood fascination with flying and his military experience, but they’re really not necessary. Because everything we need to know about Sully Sullenberger is right there on Tom Hanks’ face.
Hanks is this generation’s Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda all wrapped up in one perfect package. Nobody else working in movies can take common decency and make it so compelling, can project integrity without a hint of sanctimony, can elevate care and simple competence to heroic proportions.
At this stage it doesn’t even look like acting. Hanks simply becomes his characters.
Look too closely and you can see the story’s somewhat ragged seams, you can sense the filmmakers doing narrative contortions to build suspense and drama.
But we don’t look all that closely simply because we have Tom Hanks. He’s more than enough to hang a movie on, and we gladly let him take us where he will.
Read more of Robert W. Butler’s film coverage at butlerscinemascene.com.
‘Sully’
☆☆☆
Rated PG-13.
Time: 1:36.
Re-creating a disaster
Much of “Sully” was filmed right where it happened, in and around the Hudson River. Filmmakers recruited many of the real personnel who aided in the 2009 rescue to re-enact their efforts on film: the ferryboat captain who turned his vessel around and sped toward the sinking plane, members of the NYPD scuba unit who jumped from helicopters, the Red Cross workers who distributed blankets and warm clothing.
But the downed Airbus itself was re-created in a giant water tank on a Hollywood backlot. A 350-ton gimbal tilted the plane and slowly lowered it as passengers exited. Tom Hanks filmed so many scenes sloshing through water that he wore a wetsuit under his pilot’s uniform to stay warm.
Sharon Hoffmann, shoffmann@kcstar.com
Source: Warner Bros.
This story was originally published September 8, 2016 at 1:00 PM with the headline "In ‘Sully,’ heroic pilot Tom Hanks soars again: 3 stars."