By Sandra Hall
★★★
The typical Tom Hanks hero is unique. He uses a gun only in extremis and he never throws a punch in anger. Instead, he works it out, endures and survives.
Tom Hanks as Chesley Sullenberger and Aaron Eckhart as Jeff Skiles in Sully, a film about the US Airways pilot who landed his airliner in New York's Hudson River after its engines had suffered bird strike.Credit: Warner Bros
He often invokes comparisons with the Everyman characters that Jimmy Stewart used to play, but they had an "aw shucks" naivete to them. Hanks doesn't go in for naivete much any more. Beneath the stoicism, his more recent heroes have a tetchiness, as if getting slightly bored with themselves.
But they've taken him a long way. He's gone to World War II and back, he's flown into space as commander of Apollo 13, he's been cast away on an island in the Pacific and he's been hijacked by pirates as captain of a cargo ship off the coast of Somalia in Captain Phillips. Now, in Clint Eastwood's Sully, he crash lands an aircraft, getting everybody out alive. And once again, he's working from life.
Sully is Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who landed his airliner in New York's Hudson River in mid-winter in 2013 after its engines had been hit by a bird strike. The plane's 155 passengers and crew were saved.
The film is directed by Eastwood, who has a taste for heroes with guns but also likes the type who can stand up to officialdom. Hence, the script – adapted from Higher Duty, an account co-written by Sullenberger – focuses not on the crash but on its protracted aftermath. At the story's hub is the inquiry that required Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), to explain their decision to ditch an extremely expensive piece of machinery in the river instead of trying to fly it back to nearby La Guardia airport.
Made up to look like Sully, with white hair and moustache, Hanks is morose and angst-ridden. We're introduced to him in a New York hotel, where he awaits his interrogation. Here, he's haunted by nightmares, the most potent of which opens the film. The plane is rapidly losing altitude in the midst of Manhattan. And as it hits a high-rise and explodes, he wakes in a sweat. There will be more of these dream sequences, along with a series of abrupt shifts in time.
It's a choppy script that keeps the high drama until the end, sacrificing rhythm and flow for the sake of being able to build suspense. And there are a couple of extraneous flashbacks to Sully's exploits as a young pilot. Behind all these ploys is the sense of a screenwriter straining to bring something new to a story many people feel they know already. But somehow it works.
The mood is conditioned by the sombreness of a New York winter. To distract himself from his sleeplessness, Sully goes jogging through the early morning mist with Skiles, his only confidante, who fortunately is a much more upbeat character than he is. Eckhart is the most adaptable of actors. When he was younger, he brought a gimlet-eyed scepticism to many of his parts as a leading man. More recently, he's been slotted into sidekick roles, but he still maintains a talent for shaking things up. He's the most vital character in this film, offsetting Hanks' phlegmatic style with occasional bursts of reckless candour.
Laura Linney, cast as Sully's wife, Lorrie, has the same quality but here she's hampered by the fact that she's able to speak to her husband only by phone from their home in California.
The film's denouement is basically a courtroom drama revolving around the crash and the rescue, which are meticulously staged and all the more gripping because of it, although there are one or two distracting inconsistencies. And Eastwood finds it impossible to resist the sentimental flourish. If he had restricted himself to the sign-off line paying tribute to the New York water police, divers and ferryboat crew who engineered the rescue, all would have been well. But he sends us out to the maudlin strains of Flying Home, the film's theme song, which he helped to write.
The end credits are better, with black-and-white footage of the real Sully and his crew. A surprisingly dapper and smiling figure, he displays a charm we don't see in Hanks' performance. Sometimes stoicism just isn't enough.