JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

How do you turn an amazing event that lasted all of 208 seconds into a two-hour movie? Especially if the hero at its center is a man so dignified, selfless, and flawless that he doesn’t even allow himself to feel pride at his stunning feat? First you cast Tom Hanks, the world’s most sympathetic everyman, whom we’ll believe in almost anything (except Dan Brown movies). Then you line up an antagonist.

Now who would be the villain in the true story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the veteran pilot who made a forced landing of a crippled airplane with 155 people on board on the Hudson River in the dead of winter? The geese who crashed into the plane, causing both engines to fail? The media, which has the habit of declaring people heroes one minute, and then tearing them down in the next? That giant caterpillar on co-pilot Aaron Eckhart’s upper lip which obscures his granite-like beauty?

Clint Eastwood’s Sully zeroes in on the National Traffic Safety Board as a bunch of petty bureaucrats who are out to prove that the pilot could’ve safely steered the plane back to the airport. The movie opens with the incident, which turns out to be the pilot’s nightmare on the eve of his interrogation. Not until the halfway point do we see the landing on the Hudson; before that we are teased with nightmares and daydreams, including one in which TV newsanchor Katie Couric tears Sully a new one.

It’s impossible to make a movie about an airplane nearly flying into the buildings of New York City without bringing up 9/11—the movie gives it one sentence, and then drops the subject. Clint Eastwood prefers to make the usual Clint Eastwood movie about one hero and the cowards who have the temerity to question his heroism. You can’t miss the politics on an election year. At one point Sully’s wife even reminds him that they could lose their house.

The wife, played by Laura Linney, appears to be an afterthought: she only speaks to Sully on the phone. Yup, while the hero defends himself against the doubters, the wife stays at home wringing her hands and reminding him about the bills. Half the movie consists of Sully’s reflections, and by “reflections” I mean he stands in front of a mirror, window, or other reflective surface and we see flashbacks. The way the movie’s edited, they look like senior moments.

Those 208 seconds are terrific, and the flight attendants’ chorus of “Brace, brace, brace” is especially terrifying. An attempt is made to give individual passengers a character, then quickly abandoned. There’s only one character in Sully, and it is the man himself—Tom Hanks invests him with humanity and humor. Make that two characters: Aaron Eckhart is so solid and low-key, he doesn’t even seem to be acting. When he delivers the one line that makes everyone laugh, you can feel the tension lift.