So is ‘Billy’ a hero or not?
For Ang Lee’s cutting-edge film, traditional litmus tests may not work.
NEW YORK — Throughout the day at the New York Film Festival on Friday — at a media breakfast, at the intro to his premiere, at a postscreening Q&A — Ang Lee expressed deep anxiety about taking the wraps off his latest work.
The multiple Oscar winner had directed an adaptation of Ben Fountain’s bestselling novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” The book is a complex piece of material that covers the ambiguities of war abroad and the excesses of patriotism at home, understandably walking some fine political lines in the process.
But that was far from the riskiest part. Hoping to bring a new level of hyper-reality to the war-picture genre, Lee made his movie with a bevy of formal innovations — shooting in 3-D, with 4K resolution and the ultrafast 120 frames-per-second rate. By Lee’s own admission, he didn’t have the foggiest idea how this all would
turn out.
“I’ve done this [premiere deal] a lot, but you can see I’m nervous — I feel like I’m exposed,” he said in one of several confessionals. “There’s no reference, no culture … you don’t even know something’s not right,” he said at another point.
Lee had reason to be nervous. “Billy Lynn” — which stars newcomer Joe Alwyn as a reluctant Iraq war hero at a Thanksgiving football game — was divisive from the minute it ended. The film cuts between the hoopla of the Dallas game, where Alwyn and his company of Army specialists are the guests of honor, and the lead character’s traumatic memories of his time in conf lict. It doubles as both an intimate look at combat and a broader deconstruction of how those of us who don’t fight treat those who do.
“Really looked forward to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Shocked at how terrible it is. Total failure on all levels/certain box office flop,” tweeted the New York Post critic Kyle Smith in one of the more scathing takedowns.
“Uneven but compelling soldier drama hobbled by HDTV look (exception: the walk),” posted Indiewire critic Eric Kohn in a more measured take. Others took a more positive approach, particularly Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who said the movie had the “potential to be a revolutionary film.”
For those who didn’t like the picture, the main issues had to do with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking — structure, dialogue, even acting. Most saw this as an issue separate from technology.
It’s not clear, however, if the two can be separated. What makes the movie so powerful — the technology — is exactly what gives the illusion that some other aspects aren’t working. But it’s just that — an illusion.
As an experience, “Billy Lynn” is thrilling. Fountain’s book is a triumph first and foremost of point of view, and Lee’s bold stroke is to try to replicate it, putting you in the middle of the action on whatever field, football or battle. War, or a football game for that matter, has never felt this visceral.
The problem seems to come with Jean-Christophe Castelli’s script and, occasionally, with some moments involving actors, with some viewers using words like “heavy-handed.”
At first blush, the script seems to contain a fair number of obvious moments. But they’re actually not that obvious — or at least no more so than many other scripts audiences give passes to all the time.
A scene where a romantic interest runs up to Lynn before he must leave the game, for instance, was a moment that appeared to make the audience squirm. But this is actually pretty standard screenwriting technique: the rush-to-the-loved-one to prevent them from making a mistake. Hardly the most original gesture, but not deeply groan-worthy either. It only felt groan-worthy here because the gesture wasn’t cloaked in the usual packaging, the gloss that allows us to suspend our disbelief because it’s a movie, and movies can be a little more dramatic than real life.
This was repeated on at least half a dozen other occasions — conflicts between soldiers and other people at the game or a dying-in-his-arms moment on the battlefield. With a tableau so real, even basic movie fillips seemed outlandish.
A similar dynamic seems to be happening with performance. The actors themselves are actually uniformly solid, from Steve Martin doing an unctuous Jerry Jones stand-in to Alwyn’s quiet precocity, from the ensemble of stellar Army company members to a group of robotically vacant cheerleaders to Kristen Stewart making the absolute most of a thinly designed part as Lynn’s conscience-stricken sister.
The problem is that everyone is being asked to act in a movie that itself can be inhospitable to great performance. Because everything around the actors feels so real, when they’re asked to break from that reality — to act in even the most slightly heightened way or show an emotion that’s bigger than emotions people show in their everyday lives — it can seem artificial or staged.
There’s one more issue with making a narrative film in this hyper-real way. Lee and his cinematographer, John Toll, shoot their war movie with a kind of stillness, a lack of gloss or artifice or even dramatizing techniques like a handheld camera or a full frame of chaos. But when it comes to war films, we’re so used to stylizations that to forsake these techniques is to disorient the viewer. Going for verisimilitude is to make your movie not seem like war anymore.
Given all this, you could argue that Lee shouldn’t have bothered to make a narrative war film in this hyper-real mode in the first place; the forms simply don’t mesh. Fair enough. As Lee admitted (and every other immersive filmmaker agrees), we’re still learning which beats and genres work best in this cutting-edge format. But even so, it feels a little unfair to use so many traditional litmus tests to gauge this movie. Notions of plot, rhythm, dialogue and even character all came about over the course of many years of f lat-screen entertainment. To use those same measures, weighted in exactly the same way, for this new mode is an irrelevancy.
Where this film goes, during awards season and at the box office (it opens next month, in various formats depending on theater) is one set of questions. There’s a different question now, though: Where does immersive cinema head from here?
Studio executives, intent on finding reasons for people to get off a Netflix-ed couch, are eager to explore these ideas.
Filmmakers, looking to capitalize on new technique and fresh consumer interest, couldn’t be more keen on these forms themselves. Virtual reality has just come to a new swath of consumers via Sony’s PlayStation. New (and veteran) directors are flocking to the medium every day.
“This is still the very beginning of an evolution,” Lee said about immersive cinema and cutting-edge technologies.
He’s on to something. We’ve never seen a movie remotely like “Billy Lynn” before. But you can bet we’ll see plenty more like it.