Hanks and a ‘miracle’ on the Hudson
IT’S almost certainly no coincidence that Clint Eastwood’s goodnews drama about the “Miracle on the Hudson” opened in Durban on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack.
If so, it partly enables the viewer to make sense of why Eastwood made the film, representing as it does a happy polar opposite to the previously fraught relationship between New York and crashing aeroplanes.
As the concluding credits have it, “On January 15, 2009, the best of New York came together to avert a tragedy”.
The “miracle” in question, is, of course, the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River about three minutes after it took off from LaGuardia Airport.
The cause of the accident was multiple bird strikes that knocked out both engines. The captain of the aircraft, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, was immediately hailed as a national hero and lauded in the media.
The problem with this, as a subject for a feature film, is that there are only so many times you can run the footage of the bird strike, the pilot’s decision, the ditching and the problem-free rescue of all 155 passengers.
In fact, we in South Africa have seen the ditching scores of times, courtesy of a national TV and cinema advertisement for a local bank.
For a more enduring drama, you need other obstacles to overcome, whether or not they really existed.
Todd Komarnicki’s script, adapted from Sullenberger’s account of the
incident (Highest Duty: My Search For What Really Matters), duly provides one.
The accident was investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, but, the way the movie tells it, the investigators are dead set on smearing Sullenberger (played by a white-haired Tom Hanks) for making the wrong decision.
Mike O’Malley plays the lead investigator as a sinister, smirking greaseball who’s out to prove that one of the engines was still functional after the bird strike and that Sullenberger had time to return to LaGuardia Airport or, alternatively, Teterboro Airport.
The board has subsequently complained that Eastwood has depicted them “as the Gestapo”, deliberately trying to destroy Sullenberger’s reputation rather than as a body that is simply doing its regulatory job.
Is Eastwood just using the board to give his movie an extra dose of drama, or is he correct? It’s impossible to know.
Eastwood adds a little more narrative flesh to his simmering pot by presenting his hero as a haunted man, either wondering if he had done the right thing or morbidly imagining a worstcase scenario as his aircraft plunges into a New York skyscraper.
There’s also Laura Linney as Sullenberger’s frantic wife, who never appears with her husband but is reduced to emoting passionately down the telephone as she speaks to him trapped in his sterile hotel, where he is forced to answer a barrage of hostile questions.
The movie is solidly made, with a number of re-enactments of the ditching from a variety of points of view (Sullenberger and his co-pilot, some passengers, the river rescue services and air traffic control) providing riveting viewing.
The film is more than watchable, and its running time of 98 minutes is lean enough.
But, aside from the main event of it, the overall film feels a little perfunctory and the investigation a little forced.