Last Flag Flying
In “Last Flag Flying,” director Richard Linklater comes to grips with a reality of life that most people (and movies) would prefer to deny: Bad things can happen from which there is no recovery. There are emotional scars that don’t heal. And some guilt will never go away, because it shouldn’t go away.
These are grim thoughts, and they make for a grim movie, albeit one that has more than a few moments of illumination. Linklater wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Darryl Ponicsan, who wrote the novel upon which it’s based. But Linklater never finds a way to sustain a drama from these characters and their situation.
Set in 2003, it’s the story of three Vietnam War veterans, estranged for years, who come together after the death of one of their sons, killed in action in Iraq. The three men are exaggerated characters, perhaps too exaggerated, in that they’re less like people than archetypal reactions to tragedy. Sal (Bryan Cranston) has become a blustering alcoholic, who fancies himself a truth teller. Richard (Laurence Fishburne) has become an evangelical preacher. Both are men running from pain.
The third man, Doc (Steve Carell), isn’t running from pain, but standing in the middle of it. He carries the pain with him from room to room and from place to place. He’s the one who has lost his son, and he’s the one who reaches out to these old acquaintances many years later. He’s the saddest of the three men, but in some ways the least distorted by tragedy.
Linklater directs his actors toward big performances. Carell leans a little hard on Doc’s emotional innocence, but he owns the film’s best moments. Cranston is way over the top as a New York lout transplanted to Virginia, but he drives the movie. Fishburne is the most restrained of the three, but then he plays the character who has found peace through restraint. His moment of abandon comes when we first meet him, preaching to his congregation in the perfect rhythms of an evangelist.
Linklater was probably right to lean into those performances, because we soon realize ... that’s all he has. “Last Flag Flying” is a two-hour movie that burns out after an hour, as soon as we realize that there’s really nothing that can happen in terms of story. The movie presents us with three men, on the older side of middle age, on a sobering road trip to bury one of their sons. This road trip is also, in a sense, a trip into their mutual past. But there are no surprises, because no surprises are possible.
As in his other movies, most notably the “Before” films starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, Linklater tries to keep up the energy through lively dialogue. But he can’t do it here, because nothing is really at stake.
For example, in “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” every conversation was made dramatic by our wondering if the two characters were going to fall in love, and admit it, and act on that.
But “Last Flag Flying” is just three scruffy-looking guys either bantering or telling war stories. The possibilities for redemption, happiness or any transformation at all are limited. And while you can admire, in theory, a movie about that kind of stasis — about a real-life situation in which things are bad and can only, maybe, get ever-so-slightly better — in actual practice, this is a film as depressed as its characters.
Still, there are pockets of illumination: the scene in which Doc (Carell) views the body of his son, and the later scene in which the men visit the mother of a fallen comrade from long ago. These moments can’t save the movie, but they’re not to be forgotten.