Review: Sully Landed the Plane. Then He Had to Endure the Spotlight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/movies/sully-review.html

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Clint Eastwood’s latest movie, “Sully,” is about a man who is excellent at his job. Specifically, it tells the story of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and how, on a frigid January afternoon in 2009, he came to land a plane on the Hudson River. The movie is economical and solid, and generally low-key when it’s not freaking you out. That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends. But Mr. Eastwood is also very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen.

It seems improbable that an entire movie could be built on the minutes from US Airways Flight 1549’s takeoff to the instant it flew into a flock of Canada geese that was sucked into both engines (“ingested,” in aviation parlance), leading to an almost complete loss of thrust, and its miracle landing. But movie time can be magical in how it bends reality, rather like plane travel, though much depends on how filmmakers play with space-time, freezing events, sliding into the past, only to jump back to the now, as Mr. Eastwood fluidly does. Here, a few minutes open one man’s life, revealing layers of consciousness that, in turn, lay bare that life’s moral center.

The story largely involves what happens after Sully (Tom Hanks), his crew and his passengers were plucked from the river, specifically the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The investigators, a panel of long-faced, mostly male judges, poke and prod at Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (a sturdy Aaron Eckhart), forcing them to defend ditching the plane into the Hudson. Framed as a series of face-offs, the inquiry registers as more testy than adversarial, and the casting of comfortably familiar character actors — Anna Gunn, Jamey Sheridan and the affable-looking Mike O’Malley — implies that these sleuths aren’t inquisitors, just rolling up their sleeves to get right to work.

The tension ebbs and flows as the story shifts among moments in time and states of consciousness. There are blah generic scenes with Sully’s worried wife (Laura Linney) and glimpses of his past (he learned to fly as a teenager); mostly, there is the friction that Mr. Eastwood generates from the investigation, the accident and Sully’s imaginary variations on the same. Mr. Eastwood bluntly drops in these imaginings, so it’s not always immediately clear whether you’re watching a fantasy, a strategy that intensifies their power. These illusions are manifestations of Sully’s worst, otherwise mostly unarticulated, fears, like disaster flicks dredged from his depths. And because we’re the only ones who see them, we become his secret sharer, or maybe confessor, which amplifies the movie’s intimacy.

Mr. Hanks slips into Sully easily, with a grandfatherly wreath of white hair, a tidy mustache and an air of steadfast, professional calm that’s only occasionally beaded in sweat. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, except perhaps for an older Matt Damon, another actor who conveys the old-fashioned, stoic heroism that movie companies have been outsourcing to Australian actors for years. So many younger actors read as slier than Mr. Hanks, whose appeal has always been that he seems like an awfully nice guy. It takes talent to persuade a mass audience that you’re decency incarnate, but Mr. Hanks goes one better by making decency into something like soul.

You spend a lot of time staring at Mr. Hanks’s face, which, when watched in IMAX, looms as large as an Easter Island colossus. Mr. Eastwood, working with his longtime director of photography Tom Stern, shot most of “Sully” using large-format digital cameras, and so everything on a really big screen is really big, Mr. Hanks’s head included. At first, this bigness seems off-kilter, even distracting, perhaps because immensity in movies tends to serve visual spectacle. Here, Sully’s face is a landscape as vast as a western tableau, full of mystery and, over time, a means for the story’s radical subjectivity.

Mr. Eastwood’s filmmaking is expedient (no fuss, no muss), detailed and distinguished by sudden beauty, as when Sully, after the accident, stands alone while framed against the wintry lead-gray sky out of which he just fell. Mr. Eastwood is a musician, and he plays with the story’s competing moods and rhythms with suppleness, setting one scene to the steady beat of everyday life, only to amp another until it races like a thudding heart. The accident, which remains unnervingly in the register of the real, is a master class in direction, as the reassuring engine hum gives way to a spooky near-silence that’s soon punctured by gasps, cries and terrifying shouts: “Brace, brace! Heads down, stay down!”

“Sully” is a portrait of a hero — Mr. Sullenberger’s decision to land the plane on the Hudson helped save 155 lives, his own included — but one who, after the accident, is troubled both by what might have been (death, destruction) and by an unassuming man’s discomfort with the spotlight. Sully isn’t cut along the cynically frayed lines of assorted current screen heroes, with their nihilism lite and butchery, nor does he fit the existential mode, the man in revolt, like Jason Bourne. Sully is hewed from more classical stuff; he’s the hero whose dignity, as Lionel Trilling wrote, “is wholly manifest in word and deed, in physique and comportment.” Yet Sully is also very much alone, separated by ability and character, as well as by all the directorial choices that isolate him.

Heroism has long been one of Mr. Eastwood’s themes as an actor and a director, though his portraits tend to be complicated by an annihilating violence often unthinkable in the classical Hollywood days. Draped in black, as if swathed in mourning crepe, some of his most memorable later movies explore the tragic consequences of violence, which runs through communities and individuals alike. They’re profoundly, sometimes uncomfortably, American testaments. By contrast, there’s no tragedy in “Sully,” just sighs of relief, probing questions and an outwardly uncomplicated hero whose extraordinariness is so deeply imbued that it is finally the most ordinary thing about him. You might think that Mr. Eastwood had mellowed, but the very singularity of this movie’s hero suggests otherwise.

“Sully” is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned). If you’re afraid of flying, consider yourself warned. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.