Late Eastwood #5: Sully
A few words about the everyday
Welcome to Late Eastwood, my tour through the late work of the still very much alive Clint Eastwood. This is a journey through the prolific director’s films since 2010, a period of his career with which I’m almost wholly unfamiliar. With his new film, Juror #2, on the horizon, I will be combing though the films leading up to it, so I can learn a bit more about what motivates a 94-year-old to keep practicing his art. This post has been unlocked for all readers.
I’ve never really seen a movie like Sully before, in which the stakes are so low the filmmaker can’t even seem to commit to the fictive stakes he’s created to get the narrative thrumming. It is, in my estimation, extraordinary. Clint Eastwood’s directorial tendencies are longstanding, and long evolving, but Sully feels like a culmination, or a doorway to a new artistic clarity. The thing to understand about the Miracle on the Hudson, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger piloted US Airways Flight 1549 into an emergency water landing and saved all 155 souls aboard, is that, apart from the birds flying into the engines, everything went exceedingly smoothly. And as we all know, things going smoothly is the stuff of great drama. What Eastwood crafts from so much lack of incident is a deft protrait of quotidian anxieties—the constant second-guessing and self-flaggelating that come with a commitment to your job and the people around you.
Allow me, for a few paragraphs at least, to lay out what happens in the film Sully, starring Tom Hanks as Sully Sullenberger. The movie opens with Sully piloting the plane, but rather than land on the Hudson River, as he did in reality, he attempts to fly to an airport and ends up crashing into a building in the city. And then he wakes up. Befitting his name, he appears sullen, watching news of his “miraculous” flight on the hotel TV before sitting down with the NTSB investigators looking into the crash landing and whether Sully did follow correct procedure. Specifically, they suggest they have evidence that Flight 1549 could have made it to either LaGuardia or Newark, meaning the only miracle of Sully’s maneuver was that he didn’t get anyone killed. Sully, and his co-pilot, played by a great Aaron Eckhart, are steadfast in their opinion that ditching on the Hudson was the only safe option, but doubts are clearly there in the man’s mind as he contemplates what could have happened, and how it could have gone wrong. Most of the movie is spent in this headscape, as Sully navigates media attention, his longing to get back to his wife, and the investigation. There’s a flashback to his youth, and how his father made him a pilot, and another about his work as a test pilot. There’s a Katie Couric interview, and a David Letterman appearance.
In the middle of the film, we get two long flashbacks to the fateful flight, the pilots and passengers boarding, the plane taking off, the birds hitting—”Birds.”—the air traffic controller thinking he’s lost the plane, the ferry drivers and NYPD officers getting ready that day, the plane landing on the water, and then the relatively orderly evacuation and rescue operation. All of this is presented in realistic fashion, with careful precision and patience, and without an ounce of theatrics. And it keeps going, too, follow Sully as he calls his wife to let her know what happened, goes to the hospital to get checked out, and learns that all 155 souls were accounted for. Back in the present, Sully sits before an NTSB hearing, where they come at him with two human-run simulations showing he could have landed at those airports. But he challenges them on how quick those humans are able to react, eventually learning they had practiced over a dozen times. With some reaction time added to account, the two simulations are run again, both ending in crashes. Finally, we see the events of the flight one more time, this time while the hearing listens to the cockpit recording, and like that recording our view is limited to the experience of the pilots. In the end, the NTSB investigators praise Sully for his heroic piloting, at which point he shifts focus to all the other people who helped.
Asked if he had anything to say, or anything he’d do differently if he’d had to do it all again, Eckhart’s co-pilot jokes, “I would have done it in July.” Everyone chuckles, the movie fades to black, and a title card reads, “On January 15, 2009, more than 1,200 first responders and 7 ferry boats carrying 130 commuters, rescued the passengers and crew of Flight 1549. The best of New York came together. It took them 24 minutes.” Even here, in this final text, Eastwood keeps things muted, focused simply on the details of the situation, letting them speak for themselves. After some real photos from the crash, Eastwood shows us footage of the real Sully, addressing a gathering of survivors.
It’s remarkable how unadorned the filmmaking in Sully is. Technically speaking, there’s nothing terribly new here about Eastwood’s approach. The calm, the classical simplicity, the eye toward everyday details and concerns, the emotional isolation of heroics, the distrust of authority, and the trust in community. But there’s something about the way he puts it all together here. It almost feels experimental. Like he wanted to see what would happen if you made a movie about a terrifying, incredible incident with zero dramatic stakes, where the lack of dramatic stakes becomes a space of ambivalence, both for the protagonist and the audience. The stakes are so low, in fact, that the script needs to concoct some mildly villainous NTSB agents (which the real Sully didn’t seem to appreciate) in order to create something like a traditional narrative. And even on that the movie can’t really commit. They see the final simulations and it’s over, they know Sully’s a hero, and they say so. No fanfare.
Eastwood matches his narrative aproach with a visual style that, again, isn’t exactly new for him in tone, but nonetheless feels like a step further, into new artistic territory. Jersey Boys and American Sniper two years prior were his first films shot digitally, and both feel digital in important ways, but retain some of Tom Stern’s old cinematographic eye toward celluloid. You feel it in the lighting, and the colouring. It’s hard to put your finger on, but then you see Sully, in which Eastwood and Stern fully give themselves over to a digital aesthetic. It’s lit without fuss, and it’s clean and sharp, and sometimes it looks like something shot for a HD TV news broadcast. It’s kind of ugly, but at the same time it’s composed with clarity, and it evokes a sense of reality to match Eastwood’s similarly unfussy storytelling. This is a movie in which we sit through four separate flight simulations, along with multiple flashbacks going over the crash. It could come across antiseptic, but for Eastwood’s care for the humanity of the situation.
That’s where Sully is truly remarkable. It’s a film in which huge things happen, but all in an orderly, exacting way. Because keeping the situation in check were people, working together, relying on training, experience, and good intuition, making sure they were all safe and sound. “The best of New York came together.” The best of humanity. What Eastwood recognizes, and reflects in the film’s audaciously muted style, is how a dedication to your job and to people can bring out that best. The torment Sully is faced with for those few days, and perhaps even the rest of his life, is not knowing whether he adhered, in those frightening moments, to his dedication to piloting and people. Is it possible that he made the wrong move? Had he failed his training? Had he gotten cocky, putting himself ahead of his passengers and crew? He’s quite sure he got it right, but the doubt remains. The film is a clean, methodical rendering of both the doubt and the fact, that he did do right, that he did something amazing with all that everyday spirit. He was just doing his job after all. The most American quality.
