Movie Review—Sully

Sully

by Peter J. O'Connell

Sully. Released: Sept. 2016. Runtime: 96 mins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some peril and brief strong language. 

A jetliner crashes into a high-rise building in New York City as Sully begins. Is this movie about the horrors of 9/11/01? No, it is about a “miracle”--the “Miracle on the Hudson” of January 15, 2009. In that “miracle” Captain Chesley (“Sully”) Sullenberger, a pilot with long experience, landed a disabled jetliner on the Hudson River, saving the plane's crew and 155 passengers. 

But what about the plane crashing into the building? That type of image, which recurs several times in the film, is something that haunts Sully's mind after the events of 1/15/09, in almost a PTSD manner. The image at the movie's start is in a nightmare from which Sully (Tom Hanks) awakens sweating and gasping for breath.

Though Sully's plane's successful landing was much publicized at the time, the movie also deals with a situation occurring after the “miracle,” a situation of which few people were aware. That situation was the investigation of the incident by the National Transportation Safety Board. According to the movie, some on the NTSB felt that Sully should have tried to return to LaGuardia Airport or to an airport in New Jersey rather than making the risky landing on the river. 

The disorientating combination of the media and public's acclaim of him as a hero with the NTSB implications of misjudgment is what is causing Captain Sullenberger stress, anxiety and bad dreams. The quiet, modest Sully feels that he is not a “hero” but was just doing his job in a professional manner. And he feels that as an experienced professional, his judgment that the plane could not have made it to the airports if it had tried but, instead, would have crashed calamitously, perhaps in populated areas, was the correct one. 

Sully, in an interesting way, alternates the events of the jetliner's brief flight and dramatic landing with the events that followed. It is only after some time devoted to the NTSB issues and to the media and public's attention to Sully that we see a sequence depicting the near disaster that was turned into a “miracle” by the skill and courage of Sully and his crew. 

The troubles on 1/15/09 begin two minutes after U.S. Airways Flight 1549 takes off from LaGuardia. In a startling scene, a large flock of geese flies head-on into the plane's two engines, causing them to falter. Sully and his copilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), within a matter of seconds make the decision to land on the river.

At this key point, we shift in time to after January 15. Sully jogs past the carrier Intrepid and thinks of his earlier days as a military pilot. In a bar he is offered a drink named after him—Grey Goose vodka with a splash of water. Then we are back on Flight 1549 for an intense sequence as the plane lands on the Hudson, and frightened passengers gather on its wings, desperately hoping for rescue before the plane sinks under the frigid waters. However, the competent crew keeps order among the passengers, and New York City's outstanding first-responders go into action swiftly, saving all.

After the intense scenes out in the open, we plunge back into the enclosed intensity of the NTSB hearings as Sully and Skiles defend their actions. The turning point comes when Sully points out a factor that the NTSB did not adequately consider.

Sully is largely based on a book by Chesley Sullenberger. It is a film whose quietly professional protagonist is played by an actor expert in such “Everyman as Hero” roles. Tom Hanks has seldom been better. The same could be said of director Clint Eastwood, whose piloting of the picture is “quietly professional,” while maintaining intensity. Sullenberger, Hanks and Eastwood constitute a trinity of talent.

The movie's supporting cast is also fine, particularly Aaron Eckhart (whose massive mustache is more heroic than Hanks' modest one!), Anna Gunn as an NTSB official, and Laura Linney in the usually thankless role in movies of  “the wife on the phone.” Sully is a film that makes a “miracle” seem as real as it really was.

“Footnote” to the film: (1) Sully was released on the 15^th anniversary weekend of the 9/11 attacks. (2) The film's treatment of the NTSB has been controversial. Some feel that the agency is portrayed as too prosecutorial and oriented to second-guessing. (3) While serving in the military, director Clint Eastwood was in a plane that crashed into the ocean, and he had to swim three miles to shore.