Sul­ly

Clint Eastwood’s Sul­ly exem­pli­fies the director’s attrac­tion to sto­ries that recon­fig­ure Amer­i­can icons. Be it the unre­li­able nar­ra­tors of J Edgar or Jer­sey Boys that turned his­to­ry inwards, or the heroes for sale in Flags of Our Fathers and Amer­i­can Sniper whose actions opened fresh wounds in the nation’s war-torn psy­che. The sub­ject in ques­tion is Cap­tain Ches­ley ​“Sul­ly” Sul­len­berg­er (Tom Han­ks) a name for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with an event coined as the ​‘Mir­a­cle on the Hud­son’ that took place on 15 Jan­u­ary, 2009, when a geese strike caused the pilot’s plane engines to fail, forc­ing an imme­di­ate emer­gency land­ing on the Hud­son Riv­er in New York City.

Rather than a Unit­ed 93-esque docu­d­ra­ma about the land­ing, we open on its after­math, with Sul­ly and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eck­hart) holed into the New York City Mar­i­ott hotel and wheeled out for a num­ber of talk show appear­ances. Sul­len­berg­er is caught in self doubt over his pub­lic image, even if his tem­pera­ment is that of the mea­sured, con­trolled man who per­formed the hero­ic act. PTSD looms over him. Sully’s calls back home to his wife, Lor­raine (Lau­ra Lin­ney), serve as reminders that there are still unpaid bills that no hero label can cov­er. The film goes about depict­ing what is for­got­ten about his lion­i­sa­tion: that there were doubts cast over his actions. The ensu­ing bureau­crat­ic process and tri­al that took place wasn’t in pub­lic, but behind closed doors.

Con­sid­er­ing Eastwood’s out­spo­ken polit­i­cal views, it’s easy to imag­ine a less sub­tle ver­sion of this film draw­ing par­al­lels between Oba­ma wor­ship (the film takes place around the time of his inau­gu­ra­tion) and Sully’s media blitz. Con­sid­er­ing the two terms of his pres­i­den­cy sit neat­ly between the week of the ​‘Mir­a­cle’ and the film’s release, it’s hard not to see the film in its com­pact form as a cor­rec­tive to the bloat­ed tent­pole Hol­ly­wood prod­uct that’s sad­ly defined Oba­ma-era Amer­i­can cinema.

The spac­ing out of the ​‘movie for adults’, or nar­ra­tives about the real world are forc­ing the com­ic book genre to take up the man­tle in depict­ing nation­al tragedy in main­stream cin­e­ma. In par­tic­u­lar, the crass, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly inco­her­ent appro­pri­a­tion of ⁹⁄₁₁ imagery. Sullenberger’s var­i­ous worst-case sce­nario night­mares of the plane crash­ing in New York City inevitably evoke that day, though not as a way to laud him for the sake of post‑9/​11 revisionism.

The com­par­i­son extends to East­wood and reg­u­lar direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Tom Stern’s deci­sion to shoot the film almost entire­ly with an IMAX cam­era, yet set­ting them­selves apart by not des­ig­nat­ing between mon­ey shot and expo­si­tion. It’s appro­pri­ate con­sid­er­ing the spec­tac­u­lar land­ing is just a means rather than end of the nar­ra­tive. It builds to the reveal that the mir­a­cle itself was a team effort, cut­ting from the mon­i­tor­ing con­trol room, the res­cu­ing fer­ry squad and the cockpit.

The human fac­tor that Sul­len­berg­er uses in defence of his split-sec­ond deci­sion mak­ing is a state­ment of basic decen­cy against bureau­crat­ic break­down. Though there is a temp­ta­tion to read the prag­mat­ic res­o­lu­tion as its own form of stealth hero wor­ship. Yet this mid­dle ground feels like a neces­si­ty today – a lev­el-head­ed state­ment when both Hol­ly­wood and pol­i­tics seek to cre­ate con­fused binaries.