Clint Eastwood’s movie about Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River in January 2009 and saved all 155 aboard, is the damnedest thing. You know what’s going to happen before you go into the theater. Even worse, it’s only a few minutes in when you get that the movie’s take on the “Miracle on the Hudson”—Sully’s fear he is going to be blamed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for making a bad decision that will cost him his job and his reputation—is a load of hooey.
After all, we all saw Sullenberger interviewed on TV in the days following the landing. He was understated and charming and looked entirely at peace with himself. He didn’t walk through press scrums as though he were a criminal looking to get into a paddy wagon as quickly as possible. In real life, Sully seemed to be the modern-day personification of that quality Tom Wolfe called “the right stuff”—the supreme but understated self-confidence of the pilot that is only truly demonstrated by his success in daring the ultimate and surviving it. But that’s not the Chesley Sullenberger we get here. What we get is a pensive, rigid, unsmiling, worried Tom Hanks.
And yet, and yet, and yet. This movie, Sully, it just knocks your socks off.
It’s riveting, gripping, and profoundly moving—despite the fact that the dialogue is pedantic and wooden, despite the fact that it’s got several weak performances, and despite the fact that it features more scenes of the “hero talking to his beloved wife on the phone and trying to suppress his deep emotions during a crisis” variety than really ought to be permissible under U.S. statute.
Here’s the paradox: Though the dialogue by screenwriter Todd Komarnicki is wooden, the structure—which is also the work of Komarnicki—is absolutely brilliant. We begin the day after the crash and then over the course of the movie’s compact 96 minutes we are shown the events of January 15 over and over from different angles and perspectives. We see the plane’s cabin, we see what the flight crew does before and after, we see how the passengers get themselves onto the wings and into the life rafts, we see rescue workers and ferry-boats all circle the plane.
And we see the cockpit actions taken by Sully and his copilot Jeff Skiles in five different ways. The plane was in the air for all of 3 minutes and 28 seconds from taking off at LaGuardia to the moment when a flock of birds was sucked into the two engines until it crash-landed in the water near 42nd Street. Each time we cut back to that cockpit we learn a little more about why Sully made the choices he made, what justified his instinct not to try and turn the plane around to get it back to LaGuardia, and how he and Skiles worked together under the most extreme conditions to follow safety protocols, save the plane, and save the lives of the passengers.
Hanks’s performance as Sully makes for an interesting contrast with his last major real-life role in Captain Phillips, in which his ship was taken over by Somali pirates. His Captain Phillips was quiet, contained, careful, and emotionless—until he and his crew are rescued, at which point he finally releases his feelings and allows himself to collapse in fear and upset. The concluding scenes of Captain Phillips featured what was likely the best acting of Hanks’s storied career and remain among the highlights of American movies in our time.
In Sully, Hanks begins in a condition of grave emotional upset but, as the film progresses, his Sully begins to steady himself, grow in confidence and surety, and finally emerge as he was in those 208 seconds on that plane—a confident and thorough professional better at his job than anyone else alive. The same is pretty much true for Hanks as an actor.
And it’s even more true of its director. Clint Eastwood is 86 years old. He simply beggars belief. What more can you say?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
