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Nathan Fielder Made a Better Sully Biopic Than Sully

In The Rehearsal, the comedian unearths a deeper truth about this American hero. He also wears a diaper.

Fielder is taking a serious problem that he seems genuinely invested in — changing air-travel safety-training standards on a federal level — and tackling it as he would a struggling local business on Nathan for You, full of comedic side quests and implausible runaround solutions. Both of these insights, for Fielder, illustrate something deeper and more intimate about Sully: The introduction of the iPod gave him “a way to understand his feelings through lyrics”; and Evanescence’s biggest hit, “Bring Me to Life,” is a song Amy Lee once described as “a cry for help” about “no longer hiding your true self, as imperfect as it may be.” While the Sully-Evanescence jogging montage that follows might be played for laughs, Fielder is also unfurling his theory even wider: Thanks to music, Sully found a way to escape the prison of all-American masculinity and get more in touch with his feelings and “true self,” which would give him the humility not only to ask a first officer for help, but to perform a life-saving water landing. Some shots look, to the well-trained Sully fan’s eye, like direct homages to the film.There’s a line in the movie in which a character literally says, “I have read countless CVR transcripts of deceased pilots, and I have significant accident investigation experience.” That’s Nathan!

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