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There are few people that I admire in this world more than Clint Eastwood, one of the remaining legends of Hollywood that still manages to crank out some good work. As my favorite actor and one of my favorite directors, I will always line up to see a film with his name on it. Imagine my delight when I discovered that he was working with American treasure Tom Hanks, one of the greatest actors to ever walk this Earth on a little film called Sully. So, does this collaboration deliver the awesomeness? Let’s dive right in.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you know about the fateful day that the “Miracle on the Hudson” occurred. After a flock of birds struck the engines of his plane, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (played by Tom Hanks) made a daring, impossible landing on the Hudson River (in the middle of January, no less) saving the lives of all 155 people on board. What we don’t know is where Sully begins, as the airliner and the government launch an investigation of Sully and his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), doggedly questioning their each and every decision on that day in an attempt to find some sort of foul play. As the investigators begin to find evidence against Sully and doubt begins to enter his mind, the fate of Sully’s career and newfound reputation (one which he is clearly uncomfortable with) hangs in the balance.
While everyone in this film does a great job, this is definitely Tom Hanks’ movie and he nails it out of the park again. He plays Sully with a quiet, reserved dignity that belies a good sense of humor and a very complex set of demons for him to face. Sully is clearly haunted by what happened that day, not because of how it ended but at the mere thought that what he did was a mere fluke and that he endangered the lives of innocent people on a whim. Hanks does a wonderful job showing this struggle without saying much at all, and he gets most of the development in this film. Aaron Eckhart’s Skiles is the only other character who gets much development, and he is also great, serving as Sully’s partner and support system along with delivering some of the film’s best lines.
The script is actually the film’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness, if that makes any sense. The scenes with Sully as he grapples with his demons and faces the media and his accusers with Skiles are great, giving the audience ample chance to really dig into Sully’s psyche and see what he’s going through. The film is also quite funny at points, especially as the two pilots work their way through the investigations with some subtly cutting jabs at the suits that are trying to ruin their lives. The best thing the script does is actually build tension and provide reasonable doubt over what Sully did. The fact that there may have been another, less dangerous way to handle the situation was news to me, and I think the movie is better for challenging our notion of Sully.
Eastwood’s direction should also be commended here, as he manages to deliver a mostly tight and entertaining piece of filmmaking with Sully. While his trademark overcast grays and measured pace are still intact, the film only runs for about ninety minutes (a far cry from his usual running times) and never wears out its welcome. The plane crash is seen several times, mostly from different angles and viewpoints, and each time there is something new that wasn’t shown before. The exact detail of how everything went down is wisely saved until the end, giving room for the doubt to grow in the mind of the viewer as it does in Sully’s. While not everything about how it’s structured works, the film manages to overcome them with the material itself.
As I mentioned, the script is also a detriment to the film in a few ways. The film is shown out of chronological order, and while that’s fine, there was no need for one of the flashbacks to be near twenty minutes long, which is way too long for something we would go on to see twice more. Also, Sully suffers from nightmares about how things could have gone down, but we see the same nightmare event twice when we didn’t need to. It’s like the screenwriter couldn’t find something to help pad the time so he just threw in more of those scenes when they really were unnecessary. The film stops to focus on some of the passengers and their perspectives, but they never really seem that important to the overall story. This is about Sully, so why introduce us to characters that will never be seen again after this sequence? Thankfully these scenes are short and don’t detract much, but I can’t help thinking that the time could have been spent elsewhere.
The script also fails a lot of the characters, particularly people that are set up to be important. The investigators, despite being defended by Sully early on as “just doing their job,” are portrayed as completely one-dimensional villains out to be mean to our hero. Rather than giving them so human emotion so that we can empathize with them and perhaps be more willing to hear their side, they immediately come off as generic evil people, offsetting some of what Eastwood was trying to do. Unfortunately, Laura Linney gets the shortest stick as Sully’s wife, who only appears to talk on the phone and never leave her home a total of three times in the film. Her scenes started to feel a little unnecessary, as the home troubles that are hinted at never play into the film in a meaningful way, which is a shame since that could’ve been an interesting angle to explore.
Despite my complaints, I still walked out of Sully feeling very positive about it. This film is a textbook example of the good far outweighing the bad, and I feel very safe calling it a win for Eastwood and Hanks. The performances, particularly by Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart, are engaging, the story itself is interesting, and the film manages to mine some real tension out of an event we all know about. The script falls short in more than a few places, but it’s not enough to drag the film down from the greatness that it does hit. Fall has begun, folks, and while this might not net any Oscars it’s still a great film for everyone to see. Check it out!
My Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Sully is in theaters now.
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