★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Painted in strokes as broad as the wingspan of a 747, this
drama from Clint Eastwood details the events and aftermath of January 15th,
2009, when Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (played here by Tom Hanks) made
a “forced water landing” on the Hudson river when his passenger plane was
crippled soon after take-off. All 155 souls survived, but Sully soon became
subject to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, and
struck repeatedly by PTSD.
With his stubborn cyst in A Hologram For The King, a plot catalyst head trauma in Inferno and now his near-disastrous air
incident here, Tom Hanks has spent a lot of screen time this year being told by
doctors that he's going be fine, but Sully is the one instance where you
actually believe the damage might be more than superficial scarring. Maybe it's
the bleached grey hair or the bristly moustache, but there’s something about Hanks’
performance here that escapes the reassuring warmth of his usual persona, as it
should: Sully’s trajectory is far from one of reassurance, where doubts
about his fateful decision creep in from every corner.
So why, after going to so much effort to gift Hanks a
performance that thrives on discomfort and nuance, does the screenplay as a
whole fall back on a straightforward good versus bad narrative? The various
NTSB investigators are portrayed as villains; sneering suits on a mission to catch
Sully out. While writer Todd Komarnicki occasionally sews the tiniest seeds of doubt that the board may be right, it’s all in favour of later payoffs designed to make them
look like heartless snobs. Among them is the hugely talented Anna Gunn, who is
given little more to work with than a series of patronising head tilts and
irritable sideways glances to her colleagues.
Still, better to be dishing out those glances than
being the object of one: the film mishandles a good wedge of its supporting
cast. Aaron Eckhart as co-pilot and co-moustache wearer Jeffrey Skiles could
have so much more to do but is little more than light comic relief, and Laura
Linney as Sully’s wife, Lorraine, is tied to a telephone for the entire film.
It’s really starting to bug me now that – for all the invention and artistic
license they take with various events – ‘true story’ films such as Sully and particularly last year’s Everest use their female characters as
little more than the stricken, powerless
wife at home. We get a better glimpse into the lives of random
passengers than Lorraine's, including Sam Huntington as a son separated from
his father. This little aside adds nothing substantial to the narrative but it
does mean that, with Dan Fogler currently starring in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, we have two Fanboys alumni in high-profile releases
this month.
Whatever faults there might be with legitimacy of drama,
there's no denying the technical accomplishment. Eastwood may not be the most
subtle director (on a restless jaunt around Times Square, Sullenberger passes a
ridiculously large Gran Torino poster), but he knows how to stage an arresting
set piece. Here, he chooses to recreate the so-called 'Miracle on the Hudson'
on multiple occasions, punctuating the structure of the film and allowing us a
view from the flight control tower, the river and the cockpit, respectively.
Indeed, the film opens with Sullenberger dreaming of the landing gone awry, his
aircraft ploughing through central New York. As I said; very unsubtle imagery, but
it gets things off a rousing jolt.
The special effects are tangible and unobtrusive, and the
sound design as the plane drops with increasingly eerie familiarity is
astounding. But the biggest technical plaudit should belong to cinematographer
Tom Stern. Brandishing the most extensive use of IMAX cameras ever used on a
feature film, Stern makes the monochrome magnificent. Any building not
blanketed in a layer of snow appears jet black, and every element of the frame
(faces, suits, screens) take on a singular tone, like a massive colour-by-numbers
piece. Were this story the simple black-and-white affair Eastwood clearly
believes it to be, the victory of the visuals would be absolute.
For a film by the Clint
Eastwood, Sully ends up feeling
somewhat less than noteworthy. Astonishingly constructed, yes, but told in a
way that swings from ‘back to basics’ to just plain reductive. Sullenberger
aside, there’s no complexity, just goodies and baddies; those who crack a joke
and those who scowl. A very funny gag about ‘the Sully cocktail’ is little indication
that the central question of the film, once answered, gives way to a final
punchline, delivering the cinematic equivalent of a heavy drum solo ending in a
‘badum tish!’
