everything's good about it except for its reason for being (as a movie)

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2016)

So here's the deal: in the English classes I teach, I like to bring up the Rhetorical Triangle, which was originally by Aristotle or one of those Greek fellas, and what this consists of are three things in any decent piece, fiction or otherwise that is meant to convince us of its worth (obviously): Logos, Pathos and Ethos. Logos is the use of logic, facts, or truth; Pathos is the appeal to a reader or just an audience's emotions; Ethos is the speaker or writer's character, credibility, and authority.
I thought of this when I was walking out at the end of Sully, the new film by the 86 years old(ass) block of American grit known as Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart as the pilots who landed the plane without any loss of life in the Hudson river in January 2009. Surely the film has the logos and ethos down - it doesn't fudge any facts (far as I or most can tell), and it's made by a filmmaker who has gone around the block already when it comes to depicting figures who may be called heroes but they simply (in that Howard Hawks tradition) see themselves as professionals (think of the soldiers from Flags of Our Fathers or American Sniper, the former made for dull viewing, the latter more engaging but troubling at times). But the pathos? I'm not so sure.
Sully was a man who was and remains beyond reproach: he *did* do his job and did it well, and despite the doubt that may be planted to the flight committee/board who are investigating the landing in the river (basically the closest this movie has to antagonists), where's the conflict? There may be some interior struggle I may have missed, but in such a short run time I'm not so sure Eastwood and the screenwriters leave much room for any troubling character signs or things that can put this story in flux (especially as it's one that is relatively recent and more in the public eye than Chris Kyle even was by comparison). This isn't to say that from that ethos/logos perspective the filmmakers and cast don't do their job - this may be one of Eastwood's better directed films in a while, and Hanks and Eckhart (mostly Hanks as it's his guy at the top of the bill) so as good as they can in portraying these men.
But, and it's not too small a but, what else is there to this story? If one thinks back to two of the intense films that involve plane crashes from the past ten years, United 93 and Flight, they each had a) something that was intensely significant that made it a story worth telling and utilized pathos to the Nth degree, or b) gave us a character (Denzel in Flight) who was troubled and flawed and made it a little more difficult to see the story as black and white. Sully doesn't dance too far into the gray areas, and it's not really because Eastwood or his filmmaking team avoided them. They're just not there to begin with: a plane had a major problem, the pilots were both professional *and* human in their duties (the one interesting factor to me is that), and then there was an investigation. Oh, and Sully's wife or girlfriend (Laura Linney) had trouble selling their other property or something. Shrug.
In other words, aside from the centerpiece of the film, where we see the crash happen from the perspectives of the pilots, the passengers (including three who were separated due to arriving at the last moment to the gate), the attendants, the airline traffic controllers, the coast guard, and which is an incredible piece of filmmaking and performance unto itself, there is not too much 'there' there emotionally speaking. That may be part of the point, that this was a case that showed the best in people and the fact that no one died was something of a miraculous event. Is that enough to make it worth rushing out immediately to plunk down the how many dollars it costs to see it in a theater? I'm not totally convinced.