Eastwood and Hanks in Control

“Films these days move from one spectacular action scene to the next,” Martin Scorsese observes in the Hitchcock/Truffaut documentary that has been going the rounds of the art houses recently. Many of us yearn for the days when Alfred Hitchcock could build up the suspense with one deft touch after another until audiences were literally gasping with the tension. Hitchcock was not alone in this, even if his suspense sequences were rather special. At its best, traditional American cinema can be defined by its finely honed narratives where the big moments, such as a long-anticipated action sequence or a dramatic confrontation, arise out of the characterisation and a carefully structured narrative. More and more modern films have become assaults on the audience’s sensibilities and not much else. Gone for now is the subtle playing with the viewer’s expectations found in the works of William Wyler or Howard Hawks; or at least that was what I thought until I saw one recent release.

Sully, Clint Eastwood’s new film, has all of the craft we have come to expect from the world’s oldest living director. Eastwood was eighty-five when he worked on the movie and shows no signs of slowing down.

Sully is based on Captain Chesley B. (“Sully”) Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty, now retitled Sully for the inevitable film edition. Sullenberger is famous for having on January 15, 2009, glided US Airways Flight 1459 onto the Hudson River after both engines were put out of action by a bird strike. It was an extraordinary feat of flying by a consummate professional.

The book, co-written with the late Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal and a best-selling author, is not the usual celebrity autobiography. Certainly there are affectionate portraits of his wife and their two adopted children and a guarded description of his father and mother and their family life—understandable as Sullenberger senior committed suicide. The narrative doesn’t dwell on this, but Sully has said, “I am willing to work hard to protect people’s lives, to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.”

The core of the book is about the art of flying, and between them Sullenberger and Zaslow make the regular domestic flights the pilot has made in his long career fascinating in themselves, even though the reader always knows what is coming. In addition Sully has served as an investigator at crash sites and paged through transcripts from cockpit voice recorders of the last exchanges of pilots who did not survive. The most harrowing passages in the book are the descriptions of these disasters.

More positively there are Sully’s analyses of pilots who managed to pull through. Perhaps the most famous is that of Al Haynes, captain of United Airlines Flight 232, a DC10 flying from Denver to Chicago. After taking off from Denver and flying for eighty-five minutes the crew heard an explosion. The centre engine had failed. Then they discovered that the hydraulics necessary to control this type of aircraft were losing pressure. At the controls Haynes found he could only turn the plane to the left. This type of disaster was so rare there was no training, no checklists. Sullenberger gives Haynes high praise for abandoning the captain’s traditional authority and soliciting opinions from the crew, even from an off-duty pilot flying as a passenger who was invited into the cabin when he offered his assistance. Haynes, in Sully’s words, “relied on his decades of experience to improvise and lead”. The only way they could control the plane was to manipulate the throttle. It was “a hard landing” at Sioux Airport. The wing hit the runway and exploded and there were 111 fatalities but 185 passengers survived “because of the masterful work of Captain Haynes and his crew”.

Haynes’s Flight 232 was made into a telemovie, Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232, in 1992, directed by Lamont Johnson with a script by Harve Bennett and starring Charlton Heston as Haynes and with Richard Thomas as Gary Brown, the co-ordinator of the rescue. When I saw it on its first release it seemed a welcome change from the Airport disaster cycle, with Heston giving a nicely understated performance and Thomas, happily free of The Waltons, projecting a no-nonsense professionalism. Particularly effective was the incorporation of actual footage of the landing. The film goes under several titles, one being A Thousand Heroes, which Haynes himself found appropriate. According to Sully it was the example of men like Haynes that shaped his own response to the crisis over the Hudson.

How could the screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, turn Sullenberger’s story into a film narrative? The bird strike, the landing and rescue took, in all, about twenty to thirty minutes and they are shown in the film in real time. The description in the book that explores all the factors Sully had to take into consideration takes longer to read than it takes to view the sequence in the cinema. How then to dramatise at least some of these factors? Komarnicki hates flashbacks. Actually there is one, a splendidly shot flying sequence, but it doesn’t work.

The key for Komarnicki seems to have been when the landing was investigated. Sully doesn’t discuss this in the book but Komarnicki persuaded him to open up about at least some of his emotions during the hearings. Komarnicki then collapsed the events into four days (in reality the National Transport and Safety Board investigation dragged on for over a year). This becomes a courtroom drama. There are no false dramatics, and some of the best lines come from the transcript, but the exchanges with the investigators are riveting and help to portray some of the complexity described in the book.

The film begins as a nightmare, with Sully dreaming about what could have happened in New York if he had failed to land the plane. There is no explicit reference to 9/11 but the events of eight years earlier haunt the film. We move back in time to Sully and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles boarding the aircraft on January 15, 2009. Even though most viewers know the outcome, the re-creation of the events using the same model plane and some scarifying low flying through New York is at once suspenseful and exhilarating.

Eastwood has always been good at managing complex narratives, most recently in his brilliant handling of the seemingly unrelated sub-plot in Changeling. Here he weaves together the true-life experiences of the passengers; Sully’s anguished calls to his wife in California that tell us all we need to know about the tensions in the marriage; and a documentary-style re-enactment of the rescue using real-life participants. Eastwood caps it off by repeating the landing sequence with more intimate shots of the pilots when the sound from the cockpit recorder is played at the hearing. All in all it is old-fashioned film-making at its best. Eastwood’s cinematographer Tom Stern may be using a new digital camera but the formal compositions and the overall visual fluency are a pleasure to watch.

For the real Sully, watching Tom Hanks enact his experiences was an “out of body experience”, as he recognised his own mannerisms subtly recreated before his eyes. The real-life Sully has considerable presence on and off camera and could have played himself in a docudrama but he could never have achieved the multi-layered performance Hanks does in the film. Judging from the documentary footage on YouTube, Hanks has captured the essence of the real man. Aaron Eckhart as Skiles reminds one of the great buddy performances of the past—Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, John Wayne and Dean Martin—but is far less theatrical. As Mrs Sullenberger Laura Linney is, as usual, splendid.

Inevitably Sully will remind film-goers of my generation of the celebrations of professionalism in Howard Hawks films such as Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo. But these are fantasies, and the characters do talk too much about it. Eastwood has given us “the thing itself” embodied in yet another masterpiece.