Sully (Movie 2016): Clint Eastwood’s American Hero Fetish Personified

Sully movie with Tom Hanks as US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger: Clint Eastwood’s brazenly fictionalized real-life-based drama pits an all-American hero against an overreaching government bureaucracy.

Sully (movie 2016) review: With Tom Hanks as his muse, Clint Eastwood pays tribute to one more ‘all-American hero’ while attacking the evils of government bureaucracies

When considering Sully, Clint Eastwood’s taut, straightforward account of heroism on trial, it helps to remember that the title character’s name works as both noun and verb. And one can see how Eastwood was drawn to both meanings.

The noun, of course, is the nickname of airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew on Jan. 15, 2009, by pulling off a daring water landing after a flock of birds took out both engines of his US Airways flight minutes after it took off from New York’s LaGuardia airport.

The Sully depicted here is, like many Eastwood heroes, made of uniquely American clay: A sturdy, rigorous material that the director, who recently called today’s youngins, “the pussy generation,” is finding in short supply. He goes resolutely, yet humanely, about his business, in this case, the business of determining, and then proving afterwards, that the only way to save all passengers and crew on Flight 1549 was to forgo various local runway options and ditch the plane in the Hudson River.

His largest bouts of self-doubt come when confronted with newfangled, computer-simulated evidence that he could have returned safely to either LaGuardia or New Jersey’s Teterboro airport. Of course, no computer is going to tell Sullenberger he was wrong because no computer can simulate American can-do, know-how, and gumption. (Did I leave out any of your grandfather’s favorite clichés?)

Sully plot: ‘Heartless government’ vs. ‘honorable American male’

Yet it’s sully the verb that provides the film’s dramatic engine and, one can guess, was Clint Eastwood’s emotional entry into the story. Most of Sully is concerned with the post-crash investigation, where a gallery of humorless, almost vengeful National Transportation Safety Board functionaries (led by a smarmy Mike O’Malley) execute their sole charge of discrediting the pilot’s life-saving efforts.^[1]

For Eastwood, the story of a noble and decent American threatened with dishonor by a heartless government speaks to his famously conservative political leanings. Indeed, the 86-year-old director seems invested and energized by this material (based on Sullenberger’s memoir), maybe even more so than 2014’s American Sniper. And he’s given us a purposeful argument in favor of a dying breed: The durable, honorable American male.

Analogous to his traditional “get in, get out” shooting style, the movie has almost no fat and is cut with an eye for tension and unease by Blu Murray, replacing Eastwood’s longtime editor, Joel Cox. (It also features a very effective sound mix; aggressive, evocative, and disturbing.) Sully is, in fact, Eastwood’s shortest film as director, as blunt an instrument as he’s ever created.

Essential Tom Hanks

Though effectively suffused with palpable physicality and simmering doubt, Sully would be half the film without Tom Hanks in the title role. In the superhero era, Hanks really is the last major movie star whose persona, on and off screen, is one of genuine, unforced decency.

Hollywood used to crank out these types (James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper). Now we have Hanks, who’s too upstanding a screen presence for us to imagine Sully at fault, even if Eastwood and longtime DP Tom Stern (shooting partially in clean, gorgeous IMAX) don’t spare the close-ups of Sully’s worried brow. He is, we’re convinced at the start, the blameless hero acknowledged by history.

However, we do question whether the pressures of a simple man being hailed a hero will overwhelm him and what long-term emotional consequences the Miracle on the Hudson, as it came to be known, may have. The arresting opening scene, repeated later, where Sully envisions a more tragic end to US Airways Flight 1549 speaks to Sully’s post-traumatic distress.

Sully movie with Laura Linney as Hollywood’s traditional “concerned wife.”

One-dimensional supporting cast

Todd Komarnicki’s script is lean to a fault, but is given to passages of overly constructed and thematically unsubtle dialogue. He also gives Sully two characters whose only purpose is to give him someone to whom he can articulate his fears.

Sully’s co-pilot during the fateful flight is the unwaveringly allegiant Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), whose dark brown mustache is a cross-generational match to Sully’s silver cookie duster, suggesting in both men a ’70s-era sense of machismo.

Sully’s wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney), fares worse. She and her husband never share the screen together as Lorraine is reduced to phoning Sully and allowing him to remind us he’s worried and loves his family.

Seeing Tom Hanks, the quintessential middle-aged American Everyman star in a film directed by the quintessential American cowboy, one wishes they’d have collaborated earlier. But what we get is more than satisfactory, as Eastwood’s simplicity and Hanks’s authenticity deliver diamond-hard notes of quiet emotional clarity, as when Sully is told that all 154 other passengers and crew are confirmed to have survived.

‘Modest and effective’ storytelling

Shots of anonymous skyscraper-dwellers rising slowly and slack-jawed from their office chairs as Flight 1549 makes its final descent traffics in visions of 9/11. But here they feel not only earned but accurate. Later, one character even notes, “it’s been a while since New York had news this good. Especially with an airplane in it.”

Sully is modest and effective, which might strike some as not big enough, as if we’re so inundated with summertime extravaganzas that the story of a real-life hero needs to be inflated with volumes of special effects, snarky modern dialogue, and outsized drama. It is also, in a sense, the flipside of Robert Zemeckis’ 2012 drama Flight, a fine effort that is nonetheless mainstream and melodramatic, something Sully takes great pains to avoid.

And thank goodness Clint Eastwood, like the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, chose to go in a surprising direction. Consider this film Eastwood’s defense of Chesley Sullenberger against charges that he acted improperly; one that also argues that America could stand to increase its stock of men of modest virtue.

Sully (movie 2016) cast & crew

Director: Clint Eastwood.

Screenplay: Todd Komarnicki.
From Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger & Jeffrey Zaslow’s book Highest Duty.

Cast:
Tom Hanks … Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger
Aaron Eckhart … Jeff Skiles
Laura Linney … Lorrie Sullenberger
Valerie Mahaffey … Diane Higgins
Anna Gunn … Elizabeth Davis
Jerry Ferrara … Michael Delaney
Delphi Harrington … Lucille Palmer
Mike O’Malley … Charles Porter
Jamey Sheridan … Ben Edwards
Holt McCallany … Mike Cleary
Ahmed Lucan … Egyptian Driver
Katie Couric … Katie Couric
Jeff Kober … LT Cook
Blake Jones … Sully (16 Years Old)
Molly Bernard … Alison
Chris Bauer … Larry Rooney
Jane Gabbert … Sheila Dail
Ann Cusack … Donna Dent
Molly Hagan … Doreen Welsh
Purva Bedi … Gursimran
Max Adler … Jimmy Stefanik
Sam Huntington … Jeff Kolodjay
Christopher Curry … Rob Kolodjay

Cinematography: Tom Stern.

Film Editing: Blu Murray.

Music: Christian Jacob & Tierney Sutton Band.

Producers: Clint Eastwood, Frank Marshall, Tim Moore, and Allyn Stewart.

Production Design: James J. Murakami.

Costume Design: Deborah Hopper.

Production Companies: Village Roadshow Pictures | Flashlight Films | The Kennedy/Marshall Company | Malpaso Productions.

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Running Time: 96 min.

Country: United States.

“Sully (Movie 2016)” notes

Fake government inquisitors

^[1] Contrary to what is shown in Clint Eastwood and Todd Komarnicki’s movie, at a June 2009 public hearing the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Investigator-in-Charge Robert Benzon stated that the flight simulations “revealed that a successful return to LaGuardia or a diversion to Teterboro Airport was not assured.”

As reported in The Daily Beast, following the release of Sully, Benzon asserted:

I do not know why the writer and director chose to twist the role of the NTSB into such an inaccurate depiction. Their treatment of the NTSB went very far beyond cinematic license into simple mean-spirited dishonesty. The movie may actually be detrimental to aviation safety. Pilots involved in accidents will now expect harsh, unfair treatment by investigators. They and others who see the movie will now believe that the NTSB enters into any investigation with preconceived notions, and that we are intent on destroying reputations. Simply untrue. The NTSB is the best friend an airline passenger never gets to meet.

Additionally, Sully star Tom Hanks told The Associated Press that Chesley Sullenberger himself requested that the NTSB investigators be given fictional names in the screenplay:

“He said, ‘These are people who are not prosecutors. They are doing a very important job, and if, for editorial purposes, we want to make it more of a prosecutorial process, it ain’t fair to them.’”

Sully movie credits via the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog website.

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Laura Linney and Tom Hanks Sully movie images: Warner Bros.

“Sully (Movie 2016): Clint Eastwood’s American Hero Fetish Personified” last updated in April 2023.