The movie is about a real-life action hero who is nearly destroyed by pencil-pushing bureaucrats lacking a scintilla of his experience-and about precisely the kind of knowledge and experience that Sully relies on to pull off the landing. The action involved in those hearings is mainly behind the scenes: Sully’s discussions with Jeff, his fellow-defendant at the federal hearings his negotiations with the committee and union representatives in the hope of being apprised in advance of the criteria on which he’s being judged and, ultimately, his performance under questioning at the climactic hearing itself. ![]() The stakes here are high, too: if Sully is found at fault in the incident, he’ll be forced into immediate retirement and lose his pension. Sully and his first officer (or co-pilot), Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), are called before a federal committee that-with the backing of the airline and its insurers-is investigating the flight and calling into question Sully’s judgment in landing the plane in the river, rather than returning to LaGuardia or landing at Teterboro Airport, as the airline and the investigators think he should have done. Though Eastwood stages and films, in meticulous and fascinating detail, the river landing itself, from its prelude on the runway to its aftermath in the aquatic rescue aboard ferries by the police department’s emergency crews, the movie’s mainspring is a bureaucratic tale, a virtual courtroom drama that arises not from the flight itself but from its administrative consequences. It’s a question that’s amplified to a worldwide scale when he’s confronted by cameras, sees himself on television, and is recognized and hailed as a public hero while enduring spasms of self-questioning and self-doubt that are sparked by an external-and equally vast-source of doubt: the federal government. After the nightmarish imaginings of the destruction that he averted, Sully is seen in the bathroom of a hotel, wiping steam off the mirror and wondering who he is. Eastwood approaches the well-known historical events with a bold and passionate inwardness and a dramatic liberty (as well as daringly free and associative editing, by Blu Murray) that places much of the film inside Sully’s mind and suggests that what Sully has done is inseparable from what he imagines, feels, and knows. “Sully” is a movie of a furious, relentless subjectivity. The movie shows Sully enduring this horrific vision continually, as if it were a form of post-traumatic stress. ![]() Before Sully (that’s what we’ll call the character to distinguish him from the real-life Sullenberger) is seen pulling off the landing that made his name and his fame, Eastwood shows Sully’s nightmarish counterfactual vision, his tormented sense of the mortal stakes with which he gambled the landing. In telling the story of a figure canonized in the mediascape as an unsullied and shining hero, Eastwood looks past the media representation to seek the essence of heroism, shattering the shining heroic veneer and restoring its tragic nature through the looming terror of death.Įastwood opens the film with a dramatic coup that knocks the story, as well as its viewers, off-balance from the start: while Sully (played with terse gravity by Tom Hanks) is heard in voice-over, talking tech on his headset as he tries to land the troubled flight, the landing fails and results in a catastrophic, 9/11-esque vision of the plane crashing into the Manhattan cityscape and raising a fireball from a devastated building. ![]() Airways Flight 1549-in which Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles safely landed in the Hudson River, in 2009, after losing both jets in a bird strike-into a fierce, stark, haunted, and bitterly political film, one that’s full of surprises and even shocks. Clint Eastwood’s new movie, “Sully,” transforms the seemingly familiar tale of U.S.
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