'Sully' is about more than a plane landing on the Hudson

The Chapel Hill Film Society is partnering with Swerve to bring UNC students and the Chapel Hill community film reviews from those who know film best. This week Erik Schoning, CHFS member and senior comparative literature major, reviews "Sully."

You may remember Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.  

In 2009, his outbound flight from LaGuardia Airport hit a flock of geese, forcing Sully to land the damaged plane on the Hudson River. There wasn’t a single fatality, and news outlets ate it up, calling the story the “Miracle on the Hudson.” 

And if you thought his 15 minutes of fame were up, you were wrong.

"Sully" is directed by Clint Eastwood, who has spent too much time in Hollywood to cash in on just any tabloid headline. The script is adapted from Sullenberger’s autobiography and is an intensely personal account of a national sensation.  

Eastwood has lately been drawn to biopics, stories of American men (yes, it’s always men — Eastwood is a director with limited interests) in positions of fame, power and celebrity. In Eastwood’s hands, the feel-good story of the “Miracle on the Hudson” becomes something much more complicated.   

The film opens in the days after the incident, as Sully slogs through boardroom meetings in New York City. The skeptical bureaucrats of the National Transportation Safety Board (played by Anna Gunn, Mike O’Malley and Jamey Sheridan) accuse him of recklessness. They argue that he was fully capable of landing the plane at an airport, and that the landing in the Hudson was unnecessary and ill-advised. Sully attends these hearings with his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), who has more faith in Sully than he has in himself. 

Here is where the film diverges from so many other based-on-a-true-story blockbusters. It is, above all, a mystery film: Did Sully make the right choice? Was his landing on the Hudson a well-calculated decision, or a bit of jittery panic? 

The investigators run simulation after simulation and continue to attribute the crash to human error. These questions haunt Sully — he is caught between being a hero and a fraud. Just as Sully struggles, so do we: the film asks us to judge and then makes us question whether we have a right to judge in the first place. 

I’ve never flown a plane, let alone landed one in a river. I imagine it’s difficult stuff.

As the proceedings continue, we relive the crash over and over again, from different perspectives and following different characters. It is a testament to Eastwood (and his cinematographer, Tom Stern) that these revisits never feel stale or tiring. Each time we follow the crash, it is shot differently and leaves us feeling a different way. We see the crash from the perspective of bystanders, emergency responders, passengers and — eventually — Sully himself. These are breathtaking scenes, all the more so because we already know how they will end. 

It’s significant that Sully hits theaters in late summer, when the blockbuster season is just ending and the award season is just beginning. It belongs somewhere in between. Like Eastwood’s best films, it is sufficiently thoughtful and exceptionally entertaining.

Unlike his worst films, most recently "American Sniper," Eastwood keeps his messy politics and complicated worldview out of it. Chesley Sullenberger is indeed a man against the system with strong individualism straight from Eastwood’s playbook, but I sense something else in this film, something warmer and lovelier and communal. 

I see it as the city of New York rallies behind their newfound hero. I see it as first responders rescue survivors from the Hudson. It’s real heroism, but not from the person who got them into the river. It’s about the people who got them out.

Sully is currently showing in Chapel Hill at the Silverspot and the Lumina.

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