Actors not all in lockstep in thoughtful follow-up
In this era of rampant sequelizing, has any filmmaker more playfully inverted the standard more-of-the-same monotony than Richard Linklater?
His Oscar-nominated “Boyhood” was, if nothing else, a compendium of life’s chapters, filmed — and lived — year after year. His “Before” trilogy reteamed Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, every nine years, for strolling encounters that compressed and marveled at the passage of time. His previous film, “Everybody Wants Some!!” was billed as a “spiritual sequel” to Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” — a college movie to bookend a high school one. In Linklater Land, nothing is ever “rebooted.” The ripples of time are interesting enough, just as they are.
But Linklater’s latest, “Last Flag Flying,” is a still more unorthodox kind of sequel. It’s a kind of follow-up to Hal Ashby’s great 1973 film “The Last Detail,” in which two petty officers (Otis Young and a young, blistering Jack Nicholson) are transporting a naive 18-year-old soldier (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Va., to the brig in New Hampshire, where he’s been sentenced to serve eight years for attempting to steal $40 from a charity box. Ashby’s film was a real-time odyssey, glorious in its fiery expletives (courtesy of screenwriter Robert Towne) and seething in its outrage. As a film, it’s still alive, and Nicholson’s cackle still echoes.
“Last Flag Flying” is a journey mapped over the same terrain, but the central trio are well into middle age, and their reason for reunion, three decades later, is more melancholy still. Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve Carell, in a version of Quaid’s character) gathers together his old Vietnam War buddies — Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston, the Nicholson-esque, anti-authoritarian rabblerouser of the bunch) and the Rev. Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne, whose character draws partly from Young’s real life) — to bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq.
The source of the tale is author Darryl Ponicsan’s 2003 novel, which was a direct sequel to his 1970 book, the one Ashby and Towne turned into a film. But Linklater’s film has severed some of those ties, changing the characters’ names and slightly shifting their background while still maintaining much of the connective tissue to “The Last Detail.” It is, in some sense, another “spiritual sequel.”
But while the film’s gentle, rolling humanism is indeed its own, “The Last Detail” stands like an unspoken island around which the movie flows. The balance of the trio is off too. Cranston, a very gifted performer, is acting like a funny live wire while Nicholson simply was one. Carell, who can render innocence as well as anyone, gives a performance that feels hollowed out by its grieving solemnity. Fishburne, never one unsure of his footing, alone feels in the right place.
And while “Last Flag Flying” is missing the edge of Towne’s dialogue, it’s a deeply thoughtful film about how so much changes while so much stays the same. It might be 30 years later, but time hasn’t altered the injustice for the foot soldiers enlisted to fight ill-conceived wars. When the guys arrive in Washington to see the body of Doc’s son, they soon find themselves disagreeing with a hardline Marine colonel (Yul Vazquez) who disapproves of Doc’s decision to bury his son at home in Portsmouth, N.H., instead of at Arlington National Cemetery. The colonel and his tone are, to Sal, exceedingly familiar.
That “Last Flag Flying” is a sequel, with future installments sure to come, is the point. Times change. New wars are fought. The same kids pay the price.