Sully a riveting tale of heroism on board and off

We probably all remember the incredible story of the pilot who safely landed his passenger plane into New York’s Hudson River on a cold January morning in 2009. It wasn’t called the Miracle on the Hudson for nothing.

Soon after takeoff, the plane flew through a flock of geese, many of which were killed when they destroyed the engines. Flying without power at an astoundingly low altitude, pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger navigated the plane safely onto the river. All passengers and crew lived through the incident, another feat of avionics. Most water landings don’t end nearly so well.

What few of us knew was what happened afterward. Sully (portrayed by Tom Hanks) and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) had to go before the National Transportation Safety Board to defend their actions. It turned out that there was a report that the left engine still had power. Also, the government agency had other pilots fly through multiple computer simulations of the incident. They successfully landed at other airports, not in the middle of an icy river in the middle of a bustling mega-metropolis.

Director Clint Eastwood has turned this ‘hero worship’ tale into a behind the scenes look at how people who have admirable accomplishments must still face a public machine that is bent on discrediting them. Sully, as we learn from the film based on the real pilot’s own autobiography, had more than 40 years’ worth of experience flying all kinds of planes, including crop dusters and fighter jets. He comes across as a man of high integrity, yet when the NTSB’s computers keep saying that he messed up, he becomes filled with self-doubt in the face of such a harsh rebuke.

As usual, Hanks fills the role with the kind of bland upstandingness that we’ve come to know and love and depend on him for. He’s a moderately versatile actor but even when he plays a villain like that one time in Road to Perdition he still comes across as a likeable and father figure with a strong moral centre.

But that’s exactly what this role demands. Sullenberger is indeed a most capable and unflappable pilot who finds himself in the direst situation yet manages to save the day for him and 154 other people. Because of these circumstances, he is a highly sympathetic character who must face a bureaucracy that has a penalty at its behest even worse than the fate he escaped: being a pilot who crashed a passenger plane and killed many.

Sully is a riveting story that wastes no time with back-story or exposition: the opening scene is a harrowing look into one of the pilot’s nightmares. As much as he was the right person for the job, he is still a person with post-traumatic stress symptoms and a family at home, along with all of the issues that that brings.

I originally thought there was too much of a reliance on flashback and nightmare to show what could have happened, horrible scenarios of planes crashing into New York skyscrapers. In the end, it was necessary to demonstrate the human element and that is an important theme in the whole movie. Overall, I was really impressed by this simple story told very well. That’s a solid credit to Eastwood’s years of mastery of his craft.

Speaking of the family, Laura Linney plays Lorraine, Sully’s wife. The role finds her never leaving the family kitchen yet still displaying a wide range of emotions. Linney is a far better actress to put in such a minor role but I can’t think of anybody who could do so much with so little.