Sully (2016)

Sully (2016)

IMDB rating 7.6/10

Director: Clint Eastwood

Writers: Todd Komarnicki (screenplay), Chesley Sullenberger (book) (as Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger) | 1 more credit »

Stars: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney

PG-13 | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama

Story line

On Thursday, January 15th, 2009, the world witnessed the "Miracle on the Hudson" when Captain Chesley Sullenberger, nicknamed "Sully", glided his disabled plane onto the frigid waters of the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 aboard. However, even as Sully was being heralded by the public and the media for his unprecedented feat of aviation skill, an investigation was unfolding that threatened to destroy his reputation and his career.

Read IMDB review Here

Sully Landed the Plane. Then He Had to Endure the Spotlight.

Clint Eastwood’s latest movie, “Sully,” is about a man who is excellent at his job. Specifically, it tells the story of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and how, on a frigid January afternoon in 2009, he came to land a plane on the Hudson River. The movie is economical and solid, and generally low-key when it’s not freaking you out. That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends. But Mr. Eastwood is also very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen.

It seems improbable that an entire movie could be built on the minutes from US Airways Flight 1549’s takeoff to the instant it flew into a flock of Canada geese that was sucked into both engines (“ingested,” in aviation parlance), leading to an almost complete loss of thrust, and its miracle landing. But movie time can be magical in how it bends reality, rather like plane travel, though much depends on how filmmakers play with space-time, freezing events, sliding into the past, only to jump back to the now, as Mr. Eastwood fluidly does. Here, a few minutes open one man’s life, revealing layers of consciousness that, in turn, lay bare that life’s moral center.

The story largely involves what happens after Sully (Tom Hanks), his crew and his passengers were plucked from the river, specifically the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The investigators, a panel of long-faced, mostly male judges, poke and prod at Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (a sturdy Aaron Eckhart), forcing them to defend ditching the plane into the Hudson. Framed as a series of face-offs, the inquiry registers as more testy than adversarial, and the casting of comfortably familiar character actors — Anna Gunn, Jamey Sheridan and the affable-looking Mike O’Malley — implies that these sleuths aren’t inquisitors, just rolling up their sleeves to get right to work.

The tension ebbs and flows as the story shifts among moments in time and states of consciousness. There are blah generic scenes with Sully’s worried wife (Laura Linney) and glimpses of his past (he learned to fly as a teenager); mostly, there is the friction that Mr. Eastwood generates from the investigation, the accident and Sully’s imaginary variations on the same. Mr. Eastwood bluntly drops in these imaginings, so it’s not always immediately clear whether you’re watching a fantasy, a strategy that intensifies their power. These illusions are manifestations of Sully’s worst, otherwise mostly unarticulated, fears, like disaster flicks dredged from his depths. And because we’re the only ones who see them, we become his secret sharer, or maybe confessor, which amplifies the movie’s intimacy.

Mr. Hanks slips into Sully easily, with a grandfatherly wreath of white hair, a tidy mustache and an air of steadfast, professional calm that’s only occasionally beaded in sweat. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, except perhaps for an older Matt Damon, another actor who conveys the old-fashioned, stoic heroism that movie companies have been outsourcing to Australian actors for years. So many younger actors read as slier than Mr. Hanks, whose appeal has always been that he seems like an awfully nice guy. It takes talent to persuade a mass audience that you’re decency incarnate, but Mr. Hanks goes one better by making decency into something like soul.

You spend a lot of time staring at Mr. Hanks’s face, which, when watched in IMAX, looms as large as an Easter Island colossus. Mr. Eastwood, working with his longtime director of photography Tom Stern, shot most of “Sully” using large-format digital cameras, and so everything on a really big screen is really big, Mr. Hanks’s head included. At first, this bigness seems off-kilter, even distracting, perhaps because immensity in movies tends to serve visual spectacle. Here, Sully’s face is a landscape as vast as a western tableau, full of mystery and, over time, a means for the story’s radical subjectivity.

Mr. Eastwood’s filmmaking is expedient (no fuss, no muss), detailed and distinguished by sudden beauty, as when Sully, after the accident, stands alone while framed against the wintry lead-gray sky out of which he just fell. Mr. Eastwood is a musician, and he plays with the story’s competing moods and rhythms with suppleness, setting one scene to the steady beat of everyday life, only to amp another until it races like a thudding heart. The accident, which remains unnervingly in the register of the real, is a master class in direction, as the reassuring engine hum gives way to a spooky near-silence that’s soon punctured by gasps, cries and terrifying shouts: “Brace, brace! Heads down, stay down!”

“Sully” is a portrait of a hero — Mr. Sullenberger’s decision to land the plane on the Hudson helped save 155 lives, his own included — but one who, after the accident, is troubled both by what might have been (death, destruction) and by an unassuming man’s discomfort with the spotlight. Sully isn’t cut along the cynically frayed lines of assorted current screen heroes, with their nihilism lite and butchery, nor does he fit the existential mode, the man in revolt, like Jason Bourne. Sully is hewed from more classical stuff; he’s the hero whose dignity, as Lionel Trilling wrote, “is wholly manifest in word and deed, in physique and comportment.” Yet Sully is also very much alone, separated by ability and character, as well as by all the directorial choices that isolate him.

Heroism has long been one of Mr. Eastwood’s themes as an actor and a director, though his portraits tend to be complicated by an annihilating violence often unthinkable in the classical Hollywood days. Draped in black, as if swathed in mourning crepe, some of his most memorable later movies explore the tragic consequences of violence, which runs through communities and individuals alike. They’re profoundly, sometimes uncomfortably, American testaments. By contrast, there’s no tragedy in “Sully,” just sighs of relief, probing questions and an outwardly uncomplicated hero whose extraordinariness is so deeply imbued that it is finally the most ordinary thing about him. You might think that Mr. Eastwood had mellowed, but the very singularity of this movie’s hero suggests otherwise.

Read full review at New york times

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Movie rating ★★★★

Tom Hanks soars in complex tale of heroism

Clint Eastwood still has surprises in him. Few film directors would see much potential for anything more than routine uplift in the story of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who in 2009 successfully landed a damaged plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of passengers and crew. Afterwards, Sullenberger faced an inquiry that threatened to end his career.

Even so, is this really enough material for a movie? Eastwood certainly thinks so – and, working from a script by Todd Komarnicki, he makes Sully something quite different from a glib narrative of triumph.

Like most of his films, Sully is straightforward on the surface but complex in tone – a simple melody shadowed by darker chords. Abruptly transformed into a white-haired old man, Tom Hanks as Sully is enveloped in literal shadow from the first shot, and gives one of his best, most internalised performances as a proud professional forced to reassess the meaning of his life.

Eastwood's art is in his economy, his way of holding back so that a music cue or a shift to close-up has the maximum impact. Rather than showing us the landing straight away, he saves it for the film's centrepiece – a long flashback that works on several levels at once. We follow the technical challenges Sully must negotiate at high speed, but also register the sheer strangeness of the event from an outsider's point of view: the sight of the plane dipping between New York skyscrapers unavoidably recalls the September 11 attacks, referenced in a single glancing line of dialogue.

More than anything we see the emotional toll taken not just on Sully and his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) but on everyone involved – passengers, air hostesses, air traffic controllers, all caught up in the same life-and-death drama.

Their collective triumph is contrasted with Sully's solitude in the aftermath, as he awkwardly accepts his newfound fame, faces the judgment of a committee, and sits in a lonely hotel room on the phone to his wife (Laura Linney).

When he goes for a drink in a downtown bar, his fans are creeps leering out of the darkness – a scene that surely has some personal resonance for Eastwood, who by his own account views his celebrity with some unease.

Eastwood's films are often in dialogue with each other, and Sully can be taken as a companion piece to his recent, somewhat misunderstood American Sniper – another true story, with Bradley Cooper as the decorated but troubled Iraq veteran Chris Kyle. Sully is Kyle's opposite, bringing life rather than death, but both movies are interested in uncovering the complications that lie beneath a word like "hero".

For Sully as for Kyle, so-called heroism means enduring the kind of trauma liable to leave a permanent mark. It also means assuming responsibility for the lives of others, taking split-second decisions that might prove to be the wrong ones, and afterwards accepting credit for an achievement that belongs to many.

One of Eastwood's shortest, sparest films, Sully is also one of his most didactic – especially at the remarkable climax, where the drama we have already witnessed is re-enacted in a wilfully alienating way.

The lesson here is the same one conveyed in Eastwood's underestimated 2012 comedy Trouble with the Curve, starring Eastwood and directed by his long-term business partner Robert Lorenz: that the intelligence and judgment of an individual in a unique situation has a value no rulebook can replace.

Eastwood evidently sees a good deal of himself in his unassuming protagonist, and it would be easy to understand Sully as an exercise in veiled self-congratulation. But with filmmaking of this high order, the pride has been earned.

 Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

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Clint Eastwood's Terrific Short Trapped In Okay Feature

Like Robert Zemeckis's The Walk, Sully exists to allow modern movie magic to offer a "you are there" presentation of a visceral historical event. And like that earlier picture, this Clint Eastwood-directed drama strains just a bit for the required footage to justify a feature film. Sully is just 96 minutes long, which is incredibly short for an Eastwood movie. Even in this truncated length, there is quite a bit of padding and a touch of unnecessary melodrama required to drag the film over that 90-minute mark. The good news is that I enjoyed the "other stuff" this time around more than I did with The Walk, and those who are just coming to "see the show" will get their money's worth.

The movie's entire second act is devoted to a meticulous recreation of the so-called "miracle on the Hudson," although thankfully no actual divine intervention is given credit. Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and First Officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) just did their jobs during a terrible situation and got the best-case-scenario result. This is thrilling and surprisingly emotional material, especially because Eastwood never oversells the melodrama and lets the events speak for themselves. The film offers bits and pieces of the "successful water landing" at the beginning and a critical juncture in the climax. But it's this middle centerpiece sequence that qualifies as "worth the price of admission."

The rest of the surrounding film concerns the immediate investigation into the incident, specifically whether or not Sullenberger could have successfully turned the plane around instead of attempting a perilous water landing. While the details of the investigation are interesting, the National Transportation Safety Board officials (personified by Mike O'Malley, Jamey Sheridan, and Anna Gunn) are presented as a bit too mustache-twirly. But the investigation details are relatively true to life (understandably truncated for time), and the questions were ones that needed to be asked in the aftermath of a somewhat unique situation. Even Sully initially proclaims that they are just doing their jobs.

More engrossing is the pilot's own self-doubts, as he realizes that he will be judged for all time for his actions in a very brief timeframe during an unlikely scenario. Several nightmares, including the one that opens the movie, allows the audience to have its cake and eat it too, presenting what-if disaster scenarios in a story where no actual disaster occurred. Tom Hanks is quite good here, even if much of the dialogue (for all parties) is a bit "tell us your character arc." The fact that he's always good is no reason to start taking him for granted.

For Hanks, this is another fine grown-up drama (following Captain Phillips and Bridge of Spies) about good men surviving and excelling by merely not cracking under pressure and doing what must be done at the moment. Eastwood this is another offering that takes dissects modern heroism or more specifically artificial machismo, this time with a man who doesn't think of himself as a hero even as everyone else wants to paint him with said brush. What the story becomes is less about heroism and more about the importance of good people doing an important job exceptionally well when it most counts. It's as much an ode to high-stakes competence as any Aaron Sorkin melodrama.

The rest of the cast does what they can with what they are given. Laura Linney spends her entire role on the phone as "Worried But Supportive Spouse," and at least one late-in-the-game phone call exists purely for a "music swells trailer moment." Aaron Eckhart doesn't get much beyond a few (admittedly winning) one-liners. The various passengers are sketched out just enough so we recognize them when they get out alive, and there is subtle satire as local media reports the passengers as being on the brink of doom as we watch them being rescued. Of note, Patch Darragh shines in a brief turn as air traffic controller Patrick Harten.

Sully is the first feature film to be shot almost entirely on ALEXA IMAX 65mm cameras, and the results are about as impressive as you'd expect. Yes, there are lots of scenes of men sitting at desks interrogating each other, but the actual aerial footage (including some unnecessary flashbacks to Sully's younger days) is remarkable as are the moments set in the middle of a crowded New York night. There is one shot, with Sully standing center stage post-rescue as the crashed airliner and the various rescue boats and emergency vehicles take up the rest of the enormous frame, that should be framed and hung on the walls at the IMAX corporate offices. Cinematographer Tom Stern earns his place in the trivia books with this one.

So yes, see Sully in IMAX if you can. I can and will note that much of the surrounding material is glorified padding for what amounts to a near-real time recreation of a dramatic event. But the "main event" is worth your money, both viscerally and emotionally, and the surrounding material is far less egregious than The Walk's first two acts. And yes, it's better paced and more satisfying than Robert Zemeckis's ambitious but overlong Flight (sorry to pick on Zemeckis, I can only hope Arrival is half as good as Contact). Sully is a superb short movie encased within an okay feature film. But that short film is worth the price of that IMAX ticket.

 Read full review at Forbes

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Clint Eastwood’s Dutiful Sully Is Too Heavy for Liftoff

Attention passengers: From the moment it was announced, Sully could be described in one word: Inevitable. A big-effects feature about hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger? Directed by Clint Eastwood? Starring Tom Hanks? Of course. Hollywood was never going to let the beloved Sullenberger go to his grave without making him the fulcrum of a film; the age-appropriate Hanks represents all things right and American; Eastwood is naturally drawn to the lone gunslinger who shoots from the hip – or in this case, the airline pilot who, in 2009, improvised an emergency landing on the Hudson River from which everyone walked away.

Inevitable is how Sully feels. That, and a little soggy, given that the storyline is rooted not in the few seconds of Sullenberger’s defining act of heroism, but in the way his conscience, and the National Transportation Safety Board, plagued him in its aftermath. The film has some impressive special effects – very few know what a landing in the Hudson looks like, and the FX team behind Sully delivers a convincing rendition. So does Hanks, re: the not-so-complicated Sullenberger. But the film also feels very much like it’s circling the airport, maybe in the rain.

What’s really ticklish about this adaptation of the Sully story – Todd Kormanicki’s aeronautically challenged screenplay is based on Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters with Jeffrey Zaslow – is how much clearance it provides for running a metaphorical 747 into an Eastwoodian vision of contemporary America. As played by Hanks, who’s working with Eastwood for the first time, Sullenberger is virtue personified. He’s devoted to his wife back home, Lorrie (Laura Linney, delivering virtually her entire performance into a phone). He’s devoted to duty: The movie’s most moving sequence is the river rescue by ferry boat, NYPD divers and helicopters, an outpouring of New York City camaraderie and teamwork during which Sully makes sure he’s the last one off the sinking fuselage. At the same time, the veteran flier’s not totally convinced of his own good judgment. No, he tells anyone who asks, the plane would not have made it back to LaGuardia. He had to use the river as a runway. All the NTSB flight simulations and computerized post-mortems are incorrect.

And yet, he asks himself, what if he’d been wrong?

The dreams that plague him – the film’s opening scene is inside Sully’s sweaty nightmare of the star-crossed Flight 1549 going down in flames onto lower Manhattan – will probably come as a surprise to those who casually followed the story in the news. So will the attack on the “Miracle on the Hudson” launched by investigators for the NTSB. Eastwood directs his investigative panel, which includes the estimable Jamey Sheridan, Mike O’Malley and Anna Gunn, as bureaucratic pit bulls eager for a kill, anxious that their state-of-the-art machinery prove the flesh-and-blood human wrong, and that no, the left engine wasn’t killed by the flock of geese that disabled other engines but could have provided enough thrust to get the U.S. Airways flight safely to an airport. Their smirking contempt for the Flight 1549 team, which included co-pilot Jeff Stiles (a solid Aaron Eckhart), is followed by a spineless genuflection toward Sully once his judgment is exonerated. Stirring dramas needs craven villains and, for Eastwood, employees of the federal government will do just fine.

Similarly, the media. Lorrie Sullenberg, back home in California, sees her front lawn overrun by slavering hordes of camera people and God knows what—TMZ reporters lurking in the bushes! The reaction of Sully is to treat this as a huge invasion of privacy, an affront to decency—if not an alien invasion. In a way it is. But wasn’t Sully being acclaimed a national hero? Didn’t everyone want to know everything about him? The knee-jerk treatment of the press, as a plague on America, conveniently leaves out any culpability for the America that was glued to its screens, hungry for what it could learn about the most amazing feat of aviation anyone could remember. As one character says (and we paraphrase), it was the best news to hit New York in years — especially involving airplanes.

The calamity of 9/11, though it occurred eight years prior to the events of Sully, haunts the movie, rightly: The image of an aircraft coming in low along the skyline of New Jersey was all too reminiscent of the day the towers came down; Eastwood seems to take great care not to create any shot that directly resembles the images we all have of 9/11, but the memory of that day is reflected in the eyes of random characters, as Sully negotiates the George Washington Bridge and the West Side of Manhattan and comes to rest splashily stop the frigid waters of the Hudson (it was January, after all). It’s difficult not to read a subtle message in all this, about the less-than triumphal war on terror and the director’s dissatisfaction with the way America is heading. The lessons of Sully overall are more obvious, almost Randian — that an individual who acts courageously and defies convention, however successfully, can expect to have the powers-that-be come down on his head. It’s quite a message, one a bit too heavy for liftoff

Read full review at Time

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Movie Rating ★★★★★

 Miracle On the Hudson review: superb drama suits Hanks and Eastwood down to the ground    

It takes a little while to gauge exactly where Sully has landed. I’m referring to Sully the film here rather than Sully the man, aka Chelsey Sullenberger, the airline pilot who brought down a malfunctioning passenger jet on the Hudson River in New York, with no loss of life, on a January afternoon in 2009.

Sully’s landing that day was the rolling news equivalent of what journalists used to call a marmalade dropper – an event so gobsmacking that, if you read about it over breakfast, the toast might not make it all the way to your mouth. But since in this case the happy ending was also the headline, for a filmmaker hoping to dramatise Sully’s story, the fact its conclusion is so widely known presents a storytelling problem – or an opportunity

For Clint Eastwood, it’s triumphantly the latter. Sully – the 86-year-old’s 35th film as director, and his best by far since Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006 – approaches the event so alertly and reflectively, and from so many sharp angles, that the expected, arcing descent into biopic platitudes simply never kicks in.

It is superb film, as crisp as frost on stone, and staged and acted with an absorbing and unshowy cinematic fluency. It’s also about something far greater than the story at hand, namely the function of heroism in today’s world – and specifically the type pulled off by the brand of American hero Eastwood himself came to define as an actor.

You know the sort: stoic mavericks faced with tough jobs that need doing well, who keep their narrowed eyes trained on the horizon. To Eastwood, Sully is one of them – and in a splendid lead performance that’s somehow simultaneously unassuming and completely authoritative, Tom Hanks even seems to give his own crow’s feet a little extra Eastwoodian crinkle.

When the film begins, the emergency is already over – although Sully replays it in his mind, and so on screen, with horrific alternative outcomes. His vision of a jet ploughing into a Manhattan skyscraper allows Eastwood to plant the idea early on that, in a similar way to Robert Zemeckis’s World Trade Center high-wire caper film The Walk, Sully is a 9/11 redemption movie, and takes key components of that attack – a passenger aircraft, New York City, the US emergency services – and reconfigures them into something that speaks to the best of humanity, rather than the worst. (There are also clear parallels with Zemeckis’s own, entirely fictional air-crash drama Flight.)

“It’s been a while since New York had news this good, especially with an airplane in it,” one character appreciatively observes of Sully’s feat. But not everyone jumps to the same conclusion, not least of all the National Transportation Safety Board, a panel of i-dotting, t-crossing killjoys who hold an investigation into the landing.

It’s worth noting that while an investigation did take place in real life, the screenplay, adapted from Sully’s own memoir by Todd Komarnicki, gives their questioning a needling, suspicious, even prosecutorial air, and truncates the process – perhaps a shade too neatly – for the sake of narrative tidiness. Sully’s wife, played by Laura Linney, is only able to contact her husband by phone throughout – and his call home in the immediate aftermath of the landing is a brilliantly played moment of Eastwood-style dramatic understatement.

The big question the NTSB has to answer is this: are Sully and his winningly blunt co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) heroes, or did they in fact impulsively stake 155 human lives on instinct? To the board – whose unsmiling faces include Anna Gunn, reprising her best Breaking Bad wither – instinct is nothing more than a bet-hedging twitch of the gut. But for Sully (and also you’d guess Eastwood himself), it’s unconscious expertise, ingrained by decades of quietly doing things well, and the patterns of which run deeper than knowledge or habit

We’re told a couple of times that Sully has been flying for 42 years: in short, he’s the safest pair of hands imaginable. (Eastwood has been directing for 45.) So as the film sizes up the event – recreating the fateful take-off, the landing as experienced by the passengers (vivid and breath-catchingly plausible), the haunting onlooker’s perspective, the touchdown and rescue effort, and (later than you’d expect) the goings-on in the cockpit itself – it’s the human experience, rather than fireballs and spectacle, that give the story its resonance and power.

There’s a spiritual quality to what Sully, his crew and the emergency services pull off: the phrase "grace under pressure" has rarely felt so apt. Hanks is the only living actor who can make decency a special effect – and in Sully, both he and Eastwood have found a vehicle they seem born to co-pilot.

 Read full review at Telegraph

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Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

Miracle of the Hudson story in safe hands   

Tom Hanks brings dignity to the role of pilot Chesley Sullenberger while Clint Eastwood directs with cool efficiency   

There’s no doubt that the story behind Sully, the latest solid, awards-courting drama from Clint Eastwood, is an extraordinary one. On 15 January 2009, American pilot Chesley Sullenberger (played here by Tom Hanks) landed his crippled passenger jet on the Hudson river, saving the lives of all of the 155 souls on board. But this remarkable achievement, named “the miracle on the Hudson”, only took a couple of minutes, from the bird strike that took out the engines to the splashdown. So even allowing for replaying of the emergency landing several times, plus the rescue mission, there’s still a lot of film left to fill.

To his credit, Eastwood handles the action sequences with the same cool-headed efficiency as Sully brought to his piloting – you suspect that Eastwood felt a kinship with this no-frills, no-nonsense man who was just doing his job. Less successful is the padding – an investigation into the event, which takes on a boo-hiss pantomime quality as the nasty National Transportation Safety Board inquisitors cast doubt on Sully’s decision. But the film’s emotional resonance comes not from the their probing questions but from the ones that Sully begins to ask himself. To this end, Hanks’s restrained, sober dignity in the role is nicely judged.

Read full Review at The Guardian

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