Worthwhile B-side to an American classic
Last Flag Flying 15 Cert, 125min Dir Richard Linklater Starring; Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne
The new Richard Linklater film arrives in cinemas this week, and it’s about time – but then, most of them are. His Baftawinning Boyhood, shot over a decade-plus, whittled an entire adolescence into less than three hours. And his Before… trilogy dropped in on the same couple, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, once every nine years, to see what made them tick.
Last Flag Flying also has its eye on the clock. It is an adaptation-with-atwist of a novel by Darryl Ponicsan – a belated sequel to the author’s 1970 debut, The Last Detail. That first book was adapted into a 1973 film by Hal Ashby, and followed two US Navy grunts escorting a third to prison, in a journey that dissolved into a raucous blowout. Ponicsan’s 2005 follow-up reconnected with the same characters three decades on, but, in adapting it for the screen, Linklater has changed their names and backgrounds, making it a sequel of the spiritual kind only.
The director has his three lead actors lightly mimic their predecessors – so where Ashby’s film had Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid, Linklater’s has Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne and Steve Carell, with a vague whiff of Nicholson, Young and Quaid lingering around them. It’s as if the Texan director has worked out how to shoot déjà vu.
The story unfolds in December 2003, which means that Iraq, rather than Vietnam, is the conflict looming in the background. Again, two servicemen are escorting a third on a life-defining trip. An ex-military man, Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Carell), looks up two of his Vietnam comrades, Sal Nealon (Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Fishburne), and asks them to accompany him to an Air Force base to collect the body of his only son, a recent enlistee killed in Baghdad. As the trio’s journey wears on, and they reflect on all that’s changed since their war and all that hasn’t, their longbroken bonds gradually knit.
These three men are, very pointedly, almost-but-not-quite the same as the ones in Ashby’s film – the implicit point being, perhaps, that this story keeps repeating down the generations, with only a handful of particulars changed. Young men go off to war, some die, and the point of it all becomes harder to fathom the longer you grasp for it.
That’s in keeping with the generally sombre mood: Linklater’s films usually have a rosy glow about them, but this one looks as if the colour has drained from its cheeks. There are some glorious scenes when the threesome’s chemistry clicks, and the conversation rolls and flows with the unmannered ease of the director’s best work.
For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awardsseason bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic. RC