Late Eastwood #5: Sully
A few words about the everyday
Welcome to Late Eastwood, my tour through the late work of the still very much alive Clint Eastwood. This is a journey through the prolific director’s films since 2010, a period of his career with which I’m almost wholly unfamiliar. With his new film, Juror #2, on the horizon, I will be combing though the films leading up to it, so I can learn a bit more about what motivates a 94-year-old to keep practicing his art. These posts are for paid subscribers only, so you know what to do.
I’ve never really seen a movie like Sully before, in which the stakes are so low the filmmaker can’t even seem to commit to the fictive stakes he’s created to get the narrative thrumming. It is, in my estimation, extraordinary. Clint Eastwood’s directorial tendencies are longstanding, and long evolving, but Sully feels like a culmination, or a doorway to a new artistic clarity. The thing to understand about the Miracle on the Hudson, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger piloted US Airways Flight 1549 into an emergency water landing and saved all 155 souls aboard, is that, apart from the birds flying into the engines, everything went exceedingly smoothly. And as we all know, things going smoothly is the stuff of great drama. What Eastwood crafts from so much lack of incident is a deft protrait of quotidian anxieties—the constant second-guessing and self-flaggelating that come with a commitment to your job and the people around you.