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 recreation of 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which a crippled jetliner landed on the Hudson River without the loss of one of the 155 souls aboard.
Tom Hanks stars as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the 40-year aviation veteran who within seconds of losing both engines to a flock of Canada geese realized a return to La Guardia Airport was impossible…that the only chance of salvation was a water landing.
Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay (based on the memoir by the real Chesley “Sully” 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 NTSB investigators were all but 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 Jimmie 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’ve got Tom Hanks. He’s more than enough to hang a movie on, and we gladly let him take us where he will.
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).
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