Fly Hard: SULLY

A most unusually structured mainstream Hollywood effort, Clint Eastwood’s Sully is more than you’d expect from a based-on-a-true-miracle movie. It has the requisite stunningly realized and vividly recreated central reenactment of an amazing real-life event, in this case Captain Sully’s emergency water landing of a US Airways jet in New York City’s Hudson River on January 15, 2009. But Eastwood’s film isn’t interested in easy heroism. It’s about process, about skilled people doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and about the constant churning reliving of a traumatic event in its swirling aftermath. This is a movie that knows just because the outcome was a success – the reason the story is so memorable in the first place is not simply that a jet went down, but that every single passenger and crew member lived – doesn’t make the event any less rattling. And just because we know the outcome doesn’t make it any less harrowing.

The movie knows we know what happened and doesn’t take any steps to hide it. Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay begins in a nightmare, as Sully (Tom Hanks) awakes the morning after the miracle having dreamt it had gone wrong and they all went down in flames. A news report is hammering away with the real ending: all survived. This is a movie about what happened that day, told from a variety of angles, remembrances, and reenactments. Eventually the movie arrives at its centerpiece: a lengthy, involving, grippingly detail-oriented view of the event from boarding to takeoff to sudden bird strikes mere moments later that leave both engines useless and then a long, scary descent past the city and into the river. But first we see Sully and his co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart) interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board (whose members include Mike O’Malley and Anna Gunn). They’re forced to tell their story, explain why they couldn’t make it safely back to a runway. This is a movie not about bold men taking decisive heroic action. It’s about instinct, knowledge, training, and group efforts. It’s about doing the job.

Circling the main event, Sully’s present tense follows the man recovering. We see the crash in dream, flashback, news coverage, interviews, interrogations, flight recordings, and simulations. It’s a sturdy evocation of a man whose mind continually, inevitably returns again and again to relive his trauma by personal choice and public need. He’s still in shock, stuck in a hotel waiting for the board’s investigation to complete so he can get back in the air. Meanwhile, strangers awed by his noteworthy feat stop to shake his hand or give him a hug, Katie Couric and David Letterman want him on their shows, and his wife (Laura Linney) calls to check up on him. But none of this interrupts his mind as he wonders if he did all he could. Did he make the right decisions? Could this have all been avoided? The answer is yes and no. He behaved perfectly under pressure, and accidents happen. But his work ethic is such that he simply can’t square the heroic image in public with his humble workaday private self. He’s just one man, who happened to have the right training and the right experience to allow him to make the right calls quickly and under pressure. He just wanted to make sure everyone was safe.

Eastwood lingers on this ordinary professionalism, using Hanks’ subtle humility and aw-shucks low-key Americana persona to great effect. Hanks projects a confident, compassionate, fatherly presence. It’s a strong, honest, hardworking masculinity that’s not bravado, but simply routine and behavioral. He’s warm and earnest, but not arrogant or aggressive. He’s simply nice. It’s a perfect part of the film’s portrait of process that reveals the everyday bravery of people who have skills, knowledge, expertise, empathy, and a moral sense of duty. (And like Eastwood’s other recent films – J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, American Sniper – it’s interested in the effects public feats have on private lives.) Sully is a movie that finds different perspectives beyond the leading man: the steady co-pilot, the efficient flight attendants, the alert traffic controller, the responsive passengers, the confident coast guard and quick-thinking ferry boat captains who race to the scene. Everyone plays an important part and living through it marks all. A Hawksian vision of humanity at its best and most cooperative, it’s a quietly moving movie about people in peril not succumbing to selfish panic, but taking one step at a time to safety. The film is understated, humane, warm, even softly funny, recognizing the normality of the men and women who experienced something that doesn’t normally succeed. The lead of the investigation eventually admits it’s the first time he’s listened to a black box while sitting next to the pilots.

Shot in bright and crisp digital full-frame IMAX by cinematographer Tom Stern, the movie’s most overwhelming when it puts the audience in the plane as it dives – at once terrifyingly fast and agonizingly slow – to the river. Eastwood increases the panic by tracing the plane’s arc past skyscrapers and skyline, even coming close to a bridge. The words 9/11 are never spoken in the film, but hang over the proceedings, never more so than in a moving passage during the centerpiece sequence that cuts to New Yorkers catching sight of the low-flying jet, the horror and surprise registering on their faces with a clear “oh, no, not again” feeling. It’s done largely silently, adding to the haunting reminder of how badly this could have ended. As the movie continues in its repetitions, finding new viewpoints from and techniques through which to view and explain the miracle, Eastwood lets the details accrue. Though it opens by reminding us of the outcome and then lets us see the events in so many ways so many times, it retains its suspense and its fascination the whole way through. It has the skill to show us an amazing feat, and the perspective to know the outcome was astounding through nothing more than capable people committed to doing the best they could with the circumstances given to them.

Love and Death: HEREAFTER

In Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s latest feature, we follow three separate stories in which people that are forced to confront death find nothing but endless questions filling their restless minds. There’s the French journalist (Cécile de France) who is caught in a natural disaster. There are the London-dwelling twin boys (Frankie and George McLaren) who are about to experience a death in the family. Then there’s the Californian psychic (Matt Damon) who can communicate with the dead; the briefest touch of a stranger gives him visions of blurry blue-gray figures that wish to communicate. Each encounter leaves the characters rattled. The journalist can’t keep her mind on her work. The boys are forced to cope with a painful loss that can’t be understood. The psychic has long since stopped giving readings; each communication is simply too painful, too distressing. They all just want to be whole again, to live normal lives, but the mysteries of life and death are too insistent and persistent.

It’s to Eastwood’s credit, and to the credit of Peter Morgan’s screenplay, messy though it is, that this is a film uninterested in forcing answers to these questions. This is a film about wondering, about searching, about grasping for answers where certainty is an utter impossibility. How does one live a full life after a glimpse into death? France can’t concentrate on her job. McLaren’s yearning for answers leads to an increasing feeling of solitude. For Damon’s character the burden is the heaviest. He cannot make a human connection without the risk of feeling all of another’s past pain.

This shaken yearning from the leads causes the film to feel more than a little inert. There’s no momentum here. There are no clear objectives. This is a quiet and deliberate (some may say “plodding”) rumination and it has some lovely character moments. The scenes between Damon and a potential love interest, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, play out with tender suspense. The dazed feeling written on France’s face as she goes back to work still haunted by her experience is palpable. Other scenes fall flat, like moments involving a poorly cast Jay Mohr as Damon’s brother or a montage of con artists who are cashing in on their pretended psychic powers. Indeed, by the end of the film the plotting, which already seemed to feel some strain while moving between the various storylines, seems to fizzle out.

But this is not a film primarily concerned with plot. This is a film of mood and pondering, with characters that come face to face with death and are deeply shaken by it. Eastwood has once again surrounded himself with capable artists and craftspeople that have created a film with a simple, professional shine, like the team of special effects artists that provides a mostly astonishing natural disaster with which to open the film and director of photography Tom Stern, who gives the film a cold glow. Eastwood is not a flashy visual stylist. He sets up his shots simply and unobtrusively to frame the dialogue and whenever he stretches to show a few unclear seconds of a foggy hereafter, he doesn’t always achieve the needed effect.

Even so, the primal power of the topic pushes the film forward. This is a film that boldly and uneasily takes on the subject of death. It’s not conventionally satisfying, and a bit confused. But it’s compelling enough with scenes of strong feeling and a gripping, futile longing for the comfort of certainty.