Star turns from a top-notch trio
RICHARD LINKLATER’S last two films were 2014’s deservedly acclaimed Boyhood and 2016’s rather over-praised Everybody Wants Some!! His next feature, due out later this year, is the highly anticipated Where’d You Go, Bernadette, with cate Blanchett.
In the meantime, Last Flag Flying consolidates his reputation as a film-maker to watch, indeed to cherish. With one or two caveats, I enjoyed it enormously.
Essentially, it’s a road movie, set in the eastern United States in 2003, while war rages in Iraq. Linklater co-wrote it with the novelist Darryl Ponicsan, on whose book it is based. That makes it, very loosely, a sequel to the 1973 film The Last Detail, which was also based on a Ponicsan novel, starred Jack Nicholson, and was notorious at the time for the most F-words ever uttered on screen.
Like so many road movies, Last Flag Flying occasionally veers in some fanciful directions, but it’s a thought-provoking, often funny, and at times, deeply moving story. Steve carell, again reminding us what a very fine straight actor he is, plays Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd, a gentle, rather timid veteran of the Vietnam War, whose naval service ended in disgrace with a Bad conduct Discharge.
Decades later, he is propelled by a family tragedy to look up a couple of old friends from his service days, whose influence on him back in Vietnam was clearly less than benign.
Bryan cranston is on rollicking form as one of them, a voluble, cynical bar owner called Sal Nealon. Laurence Fishburne plays the other, Richard Mueller, who has put his hell-raising days behind him to become a clergyman.
Doc wants the two men to accompany him to a military funeral, which brings this distinctly unlikely trio back into uneasy contact with Marine corps discipline for the first time in years.
That dynamic, mixed with Sal’s contempt for religion, makes for some lively confrontations, nicely scripted and deliciously performed by three actors at the top of their game.
cranston dominates, but it’s carell who really catches the eye as a man heartrendingly trying to make sense of a harrowing personal calamity.