Sully (12A)

four stars

Dir: Clint Eastwood

With: Tom Hanks, Laura Linney, Aaron Eckhart

Runtime: 96 minutes

SULLY, directed by Clint Eastwood, tells the true story of US Airways Flight 1549. You remember it, right? January 2009, plane was forced to land on the Hudson River in New York after a bird strike wrecked both engines? It was called the “miracle on the Hudson” by the media, all 155 passengers and crew survived, and the captain, “Sully” Sullenberger, was hailed a hero. Show over.

Except as Eastwood and his cast demonstrate, it was not that simple. There was more to an already great story, and this solidly entertaining picture reveals it. As for Eastwood’s gut-churning depiction of the crash itself, nervous flyers should disembark now.

Eschewing the fancy labels affixed by the media to the event, Eastwood calls his picture plain old Sully, after the man at its centre. This is another of Eastwood’s all-American hero films, following American Sniper, Gran Torino, Flags of our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima. It is an approach that has its upsides and downsides. On the upside, the main character has a lot of heart and Eastwood loses no chance to show it. But at the same time he also takes every opportunity to wave the stars and stripes, sometimes to excessive effect.

Tom Hanks plays Chesley Sullenberger, a pilot with 42 years of flying experience when he boarded what was meant to be a routine flight from La Guardia airport in New York to Charlotte, North Carolina. The film opens in the days after the successful landing, when everyone wanted to pat white-haired, unassuming Sully on the back (or, if they were women, hug him).

It is the job of the safety investigators, however, to take a step back and find out more. The airline is also being circled by its insurance companies. Not everyone agrees with Sully that there was no choice but to land on the water. Was the damage to the plane as catastrophic as he said? Could he have turned back to La Guardia, or made it to another airport?

These are just some of the questions Sully and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) have to answer. They have battled adverse, unpredictable, natural events. Now the fight is about man versus computers, humans against hardware, theory and reality. Who and what can be trusted when the chips are down/the birds hit the engines?

The screenplay is based on Sullenberger’s book, Highest Duty, and all the facts of the day are dutifully set out by Eastwood. But he does exactly what he has to do with such a well-known story, which is to throw the completed jigsaw in the air and reassemble it in his own way. Thus we jet back and forth from the investigation room to Sully’s past, all the while inching towards what will be the film’s centrepiece – the landing on the Hudson.

Eastwood handles this like the old master he is. We see the run up to the event from multiple points of view: from the air traffic controller who thinks he has lost the plane, to people in offices around New York who could see the aircraft flying too low and knew something terrible was amiss. Ferry operators, police, news crews – Eastwood piles eye witness report upon eye witness report to increasingly powerful effect.

But nothing can match the scenes in the cabin itself as passengers are told to brace for impact, and then the crash into the freezing waters. Even though we know how things turned out, I defy anyone to watch these scenes and not feel their nerves shredding.

Laura Linney doesn’t have a lot to do as Sully’s wife waiting at home, while Eckhart makes the perfect wing man for Hanks – solid, reliable, happy to step back. Hanks is just plain old magnificent. It has become customary to wheel in the Jimmy Stewart comparisons when talking about Hanks, but there is a complexity to Hanks, a vulnerability, a sadness, that is all his own. He is wonderful to watch, a regular cinematic miracle in his own right, and he lands Eastwood’s baby perfectly.