The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Memorable men
Effects of war on three friends explored in Linklater’s excellent ‘Last Flag Flying’
Director Richard Linklater has a true gift for creating and developing impactful characters in his films. ¶ Whether you’re talking about the exaggerated hard-partying young people in comedies “Dazed and Confused” and “Everybody Wants Some” or the oh-so-real-feeling creations of his “Before” trilogy or of the Academy Award-nominated and uniquely shot “Boyhood,” his characters so often are memorable. ¶ And that gift is what makes his latest film, “Last Flag Flying,” such a wonderful work, as well. This tale about how war has affected the lives of three men — and, for one of the men, we’re talking about two wars with devastating consequences — is deeply satisfying to experience.
“Last Flag Flying” is based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Darryl Ponicsan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. While the novel was a sequel to his 1970 novel, “The Last Detail,” the movie is not a true sequel to the 1973 adaptation of “The Last Detail” that starred Jack Nicholson, the characters having different names than those in the previous movie, for one thing.
Speaking of characters, we meet two of them early on, as a man portrayed by Steve Carell (sporting a hefty mustache) walks into a dive bar where the bartender is played by Bryan Cranston.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Carell’s character asks.
“Sweet Jesus,” Cranston’s character says after getting right in front of him and taking a good look. “Doc?”
These men knew each other during their time serving in Vietnam. Carell’s Larry “Doc” Shepherd was a Navy Corps medic, and Cranston’s Sal Nealon was a Marine.
The next morning, it’s clear the men spent the night in Sal’s Bar and Grille, reminiscing, drinking, eating pizza and, eventually, passing out. Sal offers Doc a beer and the last slice of pizza, and while Doc declines, Sal has a bit of both. What Doc wants is for Sal to take a drive with him.
Doc leads Sal to a church, and while the latter isn’t interested in going in — if you’ve been in one, you’ve been in them all, he reasons — he yields to the former’s wishes. Inside, Sal cannot believe his eyes and ears; there, in front of the congregation, the Rev. Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) — once a wild animal of a man Sal knew as “Mueller the Mauler” — is preaching the word of God.
“Oh my (expletive) God,” Sal utters quietly in the church.
Hey, that’s pretty much what Richard’s face expresses when he realizes the identities of these two white men who have entered his church and taken seats among his black congregation members.
During a subsequent dinner at the home of Richard and his wife, Ruth (Deanna Reed-Foster) — during which tensions between the reformed Richard and sinful Sal rise — Doc reveals why he has brought them together. His son, Larry, a year after joining the Marines, has been killed in Iraq, and Doc, a widower, would like his two old friends to accompany him to the burial at Arlington National Cemetery. One is reluctant, but they agree.
From here, “Last Flag Flying” becomes a roadtrip movie, one steeped both in complex themes and the type of comedy that results from putting three men with very different personalities together. Over the course of the film, we come to learn, informational piece by informational piece, about a major incident of which the three men were a part in Vietnam — something that has stayed with them all these years. They also bond, in different ways, with a young Marine, Lance Corp. Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson). Charlie was Larry’s best friend in his unit and is ordered to stay with the three men on a journey back to New Hampshire after Doc has an understandable change of heart about the Arlington burial.
In “Last Flag Flying,” Linklater and Ponicsan tell a compelling story without the kind of over-thetop screaming matches you might expect in a film with characters as polar opposites as Sal and Richard now are. (In fact, only one scene, in which Charlie’s superior officer gives him orders that put him in a difficult spot, is a bit too much to swallow.)
It helps, of course, to have these terrific actors. Cranston, so masterful on the since-concluded AMC series “Breaking Bad,” comes a little close to overdoing it with his New York accent. However, Sal announces proudly during a stop in the Big Apple that he cherishes the smell of urine in his hometown, so the accent fits.
Fishburne (“Black-ish”) plays off him wonderfully, Richard finding himself constantly tested in his efforts to be a positive influence on both of his friends, even as one is making it so difficult.
And then there’s Carell, who while no stranger to dramas anymore — he earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting turn in 2014’s “Foxcatcher” — is so memorable for his big-presence comedy work. Here, as the grieving Doc, he is appropriately understated, giving a deft and delicate performance.
“Last Flag Flying” succeeds greatly in conveying what war has done to these men, and that goes well beyond the cane Richard needs to walk or the metal plate in Sal’s head. And yet it also is a celebration of friendship and how people who spent only a few years can mean so much to each other.
See “Last Flag Flying” — and expect to have these characters to stay with you for a while.