A Good Guy's Story Makes for a Good Movie
The plane landed on the Hudson; no one died. There's not a lot more to the story than that, but the way the filmmakers find engaging and revealing moments in both the water landing and the investigation that followed makes Clint Eastwood's Sully a film that may not be essential, but a worthy film going experience all the same. The real Sully is a quietly fascinating man, one who takes pride in his talent and knowledge, but not in such a way that he claims full credit for landing the plane safely. This film essentially captures that spirit of the man's humble pride in fulfilling his duty.
By now, the story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger performing a forced water landing after his commercial jet's engines were destroyed by birds is so well known that a docudrama like Sully can't do much more than approximate for an audience what it was like to be Sully and his passengers. That's what Eastwood and his talented cast achieve with Todd Komarnicki's screenplay; Eastwood delivers multiple competently shot, often tense looks at the water landing, and Tom Hanks holds the film together like a human bottle of Elmer's.
Hanks is the anchor for Sully in the same way he is for most of his films, and like his "American Everyman" forbearer, Jimmy Stewart, Hanks has an incredible knack for turning relatively bland characters into engaging heroes. Sully doesn't have any demons to wrestle with; his biggest crisis comes when investigators posit that it may have been possible for Sully to land the plane at an airport, and he considers the danger he put his passengers in by choosing the Hudson, despite how well it worked out. Hanks makes that concern for others' well-being genuine for the audience. The fact that Sully is just a good guy is made compelling, and given that Hanks dials down his natural buoyancy and charisma for the role, that he's able to pull it off is its own kind of achievement.
Eastwood is hit and miss these days. He swings between flat films like Jersey Boys and great pictures like Mystic River (though that's quite aways in the rearview mirror now), and he often puts out workmanlike products like Sully. Plenty of things about this film are well-executed, from the performances to the pacing—especially as the film carefully revisits the water landing many times, but always with something new brought into view—but Sully's shortcomings, like demonizing the National Transportation Safety Board and laying the sentimentality on too thick at the end, are easily felt, if not overwhelming problems.
Perhaps the most distracting issue with the film is the look of the plane. It just doesn't always look real, sometimes having a sheen that isn't right for an airliner departing from LaGuardia in January, and in other instances looking just a bit better than the digitally rendered Air Force One from the 1997 film of the same name. 19 years of advancements in special effects should have resulted in more, though Eastwood often does a fine job of framing the plane regardless of its texture. The nightmare sequences reminiscent of 9/11 are chilling not just because of their inherent heft, but because Eastwood knows how to lull the audience into believing the worst case scenario isn't about the unfold before their very eyes.
On the whole, Sully is pretty straightforward, though it makes a hard turn for the sappy in its final minutes. It doesn't quite feel natural, but Eastwood makes New York a vital part of the movie, even in the most general of ways. Given the city's own vivid and sorrowful memories of the last time a passenger jet flew low over the Manhattan skyline, it's genuinely heartwarming to see the NYC community and first responders rally around a situation that saw not a single death. If the plane had been forced down in any other city, that symbolism wouldn't ring nearly as true as it does here. That much needed resonance, some smart staging, and a reliably good Tom Hanks performance keep Sully from descending into mediocrity, and Clint Eastwood has just a steady enough hand to land the whole thing without error.