The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘CANDYMAN,’ ‘TOGETHER’ AND ‘FLAG DAY’
The Penns portray con man, daughter’s complicated history.
Jennifer Vogel needs many things at various points in “Flag Day” — a home, money, love — but if you had to narrow it down to just one thing, that might be the truth.
“I need to know when you decided to do this,” Vogel (Dylan Penn) says late in the movie, after her supposedly reformed father sneaked behind her back to rob a bank. Based on Minneapolis writer Vogel’s memoir “Flim-flam Man,” “Flag Day” charts young Jennifer’s search for the truth, culminating in her decision to become a journalist. As she shuttles between her unstable parents in the 1970s and ’80s, the film seems to suggest that if a child survives being raised by screw-ups it can give her a useful insight: Do exactly the opposite of what your parents did.
Like in his previous movies,
director Sean Penn indicates he’s a fan of Terrence Malick. There are a few too many woozy visuals accompanied by yearning music, and there’s not a ton of synchronized dialogue. The story is told via copious narration, which can be annoying in a medium that’s at least as much about the image as the word. But it works here because Vogel is a writer and the movie preserves or approximates her generous,
nonjudgmental prose (“When I was young, I thought all the exciting things he made happen, he made happen for me,” Dylan Penn’s Jennifer says in voice-over).
Sean Penn’s dreamy movie is quite different from the more grounded book, but it finds a way to represent its kindness, its awareness that these people make a ton of mistakes but they’re doing the best they can. As impressionistic scenes of a traumatic childhood build to Jennifer’s adult years, we see what she inherited from her dad (imagination) and her mom (resilience).
Odd casting choices make some moments stick out for the wrong reasons. When a celeb briefly pops in as Jennifer’s uncle, it’s hard to think anything other than, “Wow, when did Josh Brolin get so ripped?” But the acting of the Vogels/penns is pure gold. Early scenes depict Jennifer’s wide-open love for her dad, and there’s a playful quality to it even when she’s well into her teens. In one scene, Sean
Penn’s John, aping a traditional father as if he learned it from a manual, upbraids his daughter: “Jennifer, have you touched my stash?”
Movies don’t give us many father/daughter relationships this complicated, which makes “Flag Day” even more chilling. The scene where John pops up at Jennifer’s City Pages office, having been released from prison, is tough to watch. Dylan Penn’s wounded wariness conveys that Jennifer knows she shouldn’t trust her dad but she might do it, anyway.
“My abiding concern was who I would become,” Jennifer tells us, a quotation that reminded me of one from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” about “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life.”
There’s a little bit of Copperfield in Vogel, in “Flimflam Man” and in “Flag Day.” In all of them, someone navigates a rough childhood and becomes a writer so their story can remind us how we learn to survive.