Sully (2016)

If the coming attractions trailer for "Sully" was one of the most exciting I have ever seen, that is because all of the relevant action in the actual events--the emergency water landing of a US Airways flight out of Laguardia--fits into 3 1/2 minutes, about as long as a trailer. Even when replayed four or five times from different angles--like the highlight clips of a game-winning Hail Mary pass--we are still looking at only about 1000 seconds of dramatic incident. The problem that Clint Eastwood's "Sully" does not solve is how to fill the remaining screen time. Instead, one can discern all of the seams and elongating maneuvers, just as while reading a student's term paper I can tell how it was stretched to fit the minimum page requirement.

80 minutes of this film, then, is unforgivable padding. The main task of the filmmakers was to disperse this excess unobtrusively, as in "The Great Escape" the problem is how to dispose of the dirt displaced by digging the escape tunnels, without the Nazis noticing. Some minutes are chewed up with flashbacks to Simpler Times, when Captain Sully (Tom Hanks) first proved his mettle as a pilot. Then there are pointless reiterations of Sully's cellphone conversations with his anxious wife (a one-note Laura Linney), who never leaves the house or speaks to another character. The film lingers over the charmless and inert "humanizing" scenes of passengers taking their seats, and unblinkingly records Sully purchasing a sandwich before the flight. Yes, and if the film had needed to be even longer, I can imagine another scene of him buying gum, or coconut water, and another trip to Hudson News for trail mix. (A later scene involves his co-pilot, Aaron Eckhart, complaining about the price of Snickers at his hotel. We do not see the purchase.)

There is still time to kill, so Eastwood adds some computer-generated dream sequences of the plane crashing into Manhattan (at this point you will remember that this film was released for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates a successful, efficient rescue operation by the New York emergency units), as well as clunkier computer flight simulations run onscreen to confirm Sully's assertion that landing the plane in the Hudson River was his only and best option. The insurance companies, you see, don't like to have planes dunked in the water unless it's *really* necessary.

Together with a rehash of the media blitz afterwards (who cares? I can see Katie Couric on TV any day) and three identical scenes of New Yorkers congratulating Sully (in a bar, in a hotel corridor, in a green room), plus the evacuation of the plane and the subsequent bureaucratic investigation, all of this barely staggers over the finish line, at 96 minutes. The supposed drama of the investigation as the structuring framework is plainly borrowed from "The Social Network": an inquiry, and several hearings, after the fact, scrutinizing the accomplishments of our hero while "replaying" those events. I don't need to tell you that the utterly decent Sully makes a less engaging subject for this sort of thing than Jesse Eisenberg's prickly and entitled Mark Zuckerberg.

More bizarre, though, is the decision to invest the film's dramatic arc in the technical confirmation of the Hemingway-ish "grace under pressure" narrative. That is, inasmuch as Eastwood despises the bean-counters of the insurance industry who restage the "miracle on the Hudson" as a mere "video game," the movie still climaxes (if that is the word) with the validation dispensed by the eggheads and their (implausibly unprofessional) testimony about Sully's heroism. This payoff shows rather how *dependent* our judgment is on the technical and abstract performance-reviewers that the movie pretends to cast as its villain. (It was either them or the Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, I suppose.)

Contrast this unsuspenseful device with the second-guessing and reserved approval of blunt, unfussy American heroism we find in "Patton" (to say nothing of the "Dirty Harry" films). In those movies, as here, the higher-ups (who just don't understand real masculinity and the necessity of hard choices) are wrong, but with possible dramatic consequences. Patton is straining at the leash of a politicized command structure (Eisenhower is going to be elected president at the end of all this), and there is a certain tragedy in how he continually confirms the doubts of his superiors. But the sense is that Patton is bigger than all that--that his character and genius don't NEED the judgments of the small-minded bureaucrats and politicians, and that the world was more interesting before they came along and generals were left to do their work their own way.

But "Sully" is desperate for the approval of the simulators and algorithms and insurance men. A much more interesting movie could be made where the heroic pilot was chopped down to size by the investigators. We would still have to judge him "as a man," which is surprisingly NOT Eastwood's conclusion here. Instead, the big climactic scene involves conceding our judgment over to the parameters of a flight simulator. Well, not one flight simulator, but (to take up more time) two.