Sully: Flies high

Sully (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly for dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.9.16

Coulda-woulda-shoulda.

We are a species of second-guessers.

With precious seconds ticking away, after losing both engines to a bird strike, Capt. Chesley
"Sully" Sullenberger (Tom Hanks, right) and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) contemplate
several equally unpleasant options, every one of which carries the risk of killing
hundreds of people.

Even when something has been done properly, with the desired outcome, we often wonder: Might things have concluded even better, with a different set of actions?

Far worse, of course, is when an optimal result is challenged by others who question our judgment. Armchair quarterbacks who insist that, really, it should have gone down this way.

Human nature. Quite infuriating.

At first blush, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger would seem to be the last man on Earth to be confronted in such a manner; he is, after all, the hero who glided the disabled US Airways Flight 1549 Airbus A320 into a flat-out miraculous pancake landing on the Hudson River, on Jan. 15, 2009, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew. As any pilot can verify, water landings aren’t nearly as “soft” as a dive into a swimming pool; depending on speed and angle of impact, it’s more like slamming into a brick wall.

Who, then, could argue with Sully’s actions, given the results?

Ah, but that’s the hook behind director Clint Eastwood’s new film, which gains its dramatic tension from a crackerjack script by Todd Komarnicki, based on Sullenberger’s best-selling book, Highest Duty. Komarnicki and Eastwood manage a seemingly impossible feat, by injecting suspense into a narrative whose outcome we already know.

But that’s the point: Most folks don’t know the full story. Granted, everybody watched the amazing events on that January afternoon in 2009, many of us glued to TV sets. But while it’s true Sully saved all 155 people, he wasn’t able to save the plane itself ... and — sad to say — neither Airbus nor its insurance underwriters were going to take the loss of a $70 million aircraft lightly.

Ergo, the second-guessing, and this film’s suspense, as Sully — played with gravitas by Tom Hanks — and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) are grilled, after the fact, by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators who insist, armed with computer simulation test data, that the plane could have returned safely to the nearest La Guardia runway, or one at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport.

And we can’t help wondering: Could it be true?

At which point, Komarnicki and Eastwood have us hooked.

Spotlight: The Fourth Estate Rules!

Spotlight (2015) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.15

Crusading newspaper journalists have been a cinema staple ever since the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur stage play The Front Page first hit the big screen in 1931, but true classics are rare.

The Devil is in the details: Michael (Mark Ruffalo, center) and Sacha (Rachel McAdams)
grow increasingly excited — and horrified — as a fairly simple computer search by Matt
(Brian d'Arcy) reveals that they're likely dealing with far more than just five or six
pedophile priests.

Meet John Doe, The Big Carnival, Deadline USA and Absence of Malice come to mind, and they all have one thing in common: They’re fictitious stories.

Memorable films based on actual reporters who pursued real-world scoops are more scarce, in part because few screenwriters can spin compelling drama from the day-after-grinding-day research slog that precedes a “breaking” news story, which (to the outside world) seems to come out of nowhere. The gold standard in this category remains All the President’s Men, in great part due to screenwriter William Goldman’s superb, Oscar-winning adaptation of the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein book.

Goldman now has equally talented company: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, who’ve done a masterful job with Spotlight — McCarthy also serving as director — and its depiction of the four Boston Globe reporters who won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their astonishing series of stories exposing the long-term cover-up of child abuse by members of the Boston Catholic Church clergy.

As was the case with All the President’s Men, Spotlight isn’t merely an engaging — even suspenseful — drama, fueled by excellent performances from a well-selected ensemble cast; it’s a valuable historical document that details a frankly heinous abuse of trust and power. It’s simultaneously cathartic and horrific: a crisply condensed depiction of an extremely complicated story that expands so far beyond initial expectations, that — were it fiction — it likely wouldn’t be believed.

But it’s not fiction; it’s grim, infuriating and relentlessly heartbreaking fact.

Not to mention another reminder of the significant service performed by newspapers and their dedicated staffs, and the frankly alarming hole we’ll be in, as a country, if the Fourth Estate is allowed to be replaced by the frivolous, empty-calorie content of “web journalism” (an oxymoron if ever one existed).

McCarthy is an actor who burst on the filmmaking scene when he wrote and directed 2003’s The Station Agent, one of the finest, quirkiest dramedies of the new century. Singer has a wealth of TV scripting credits in his still-brief career, notably The West Wing and Fringe, and he made the jump to movies with the 2013 Julian Assange dramatization, The Fifth Estate.

Both McCarthy and Singer have an ear for realistic dialog, and particularly the careful “dance” that takes place during painfully raw and intimate conversations. This film is laden with such scenes — some quite difficult to watch — and all handled masterfully both by the film’s stars, and by lesser cast members appearing perhaps only briefly.