Richard Linklater GOES TO WAR
Director delivers thoughtful exploration of conflict with ‘Last Flag’
Richard Linklater grew up in Houston. It’s a fact sometimes forgotten since he’s become one of Austin’s favorite creative sons in the 30-plus years he’s lived in the capital city. The relocation, though, hasn’t dampened his love for the Astros.
So when the director of “Dazed and Confused,” “Boyhood” and last year’s rose-tinted remembrance of Texas college baseball in the ’80s, “Everybody Wants Some,” had a screening that kept him from watching the epic, Game 2 World Series battle royale between the ’Stros and the Dodgers in real time, he just had one request.
“I was (saying), ‘OK, don’t anybody tell me,’ ” Linklater recalled the next day in the lobby of Hotel ZaZa. “I had (recorded) it and, at 2:30 in the morning, I found out (the Astros won 7-6). I was kind of tricked because my phone hadn’t lit up. So I said, ‘Aw, they must have lost.’ But then I’m fastforwarding through the commercials and watching, and it’s just better and better. … So many twists and turns.”
That last phrase might also be tossed around to describe Linklater’s way these days. Though his career has always been eclectic, ranging from the headbanging charm of “School of Rock” with Jack Black to the relationship roundelay of the “Before” trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, he’s never quite attempted something like his latest film, “Last Flag Flying,” opening Friday.
Based on a 2005 novel by Darryl Ponicsan, “Flag” stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as three long-lost friends and Vietnam vets who reunite to bury the son of Carell’s character, a soldier who lost his life in Iraq. It’s a sequel of sorts to the 1973 film “The Last Detail” starring Jack Nicholson, also based on a Ponicsan novel, in which two sailors are assigned to escort a third to Maine’s Portsmouth Naval Prison.
In “Flag,” these three have men matured — some might say curdled — into a comfortable if drowsy, middle-age malaise. They’re jolted awake by tragedy, grief and a renewed sense of purpose. (Though devotees of “The Last Detail” should note that, in “Flag,” these guys are Marines instead of Navy men, and their character names are changed.)
It’s a sober, mainstream film with three older actors playing characters tackling issues of war, duty, honor and patriotism — and juggling what exactly any of these mean in the maelstrom of 21st-century America. Though there is humor — Cranston’s freewheeling, foulmouthed Sal is often at odds with Fishburne’s straitlaced reverend, Richard — there’s none of the indie scruff of Linklater’s “Slacker,” animated experimentalism of “Waking Life” nor time-spanning trippiness of “Boyhood.”
In other words, this is not your hipster uncle’s Linklater film. The war effort
Linklater has wanted to make “Last Flag Flying” since the novel’s publication a dozen years ago, box-office expectations be damned.
“I just loved those characters,” he said. “And I think I was so tweaked about the war; we all were. It was like we saw this coming … . There was a certain kind of urgency to do something at the moment.”
The “war” was the long-simmering Iraq conflict as Ponicsan’s 2005 book wondered how his trio of military men from “The Last Detail” were handling themselves in post-9/11 America.
But that urgency was managed as Linklater decided American studios and moviegoers weren’t quite ready to deal with the ramifications of the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts on screen. “It wasn’t meant to be back then,” the director explained. “I don’t think people wanted to see it. In the middle of the war, it’s just too much of an open wound.”
But a small cinematic stream of films about our conflicts in the Middle East emerged, including “Jarhead” (2005) and “Stop-Loss” (2008), and surged into a higher-profile wave with the likes of “The Hurt Locker” (2008), “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012) and “Lone Survivor” (2013). More recently, filmmakers have begun to grapple with the emotional wars returning soldiers often fight at home. Ang Lee’s North Texas-set “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and Jason Hall’s just-released “Thank You for Your Service” fall into this category.
“A lot of war movies do better a generation later,” Linklater said. “So Darryl and I kept working on it, adapting it farther and farther away from what it was at the time. Then I sent it to Ted Hope (head of motion-picture production) at Amazon Studios. I said, ‘Hey, you know, I think it’s the right time for this. I think maybe our country’s ready to think about this war.’ ”
Linklater said watching 2016’s Republican National Convention, where anti-war sentiments were sometimes expressed, lent credence to his decision. “The whole country felt like, ‘OK, that (war) was a waste of resources.’ It’s no longer polemical to say maybe that’s not the best use of our blood and treasure. … But if you’d said it back then, you were being unpatriotic, or you hated the troops or whatever the shallow thing is they can pin on you.”
Still, there’s no question that he’s treading into the divisive world of politics with “Last Flag Flying.”
“The whole thing is a bit of a minefield, of course,” he said. “There’s nothing more political in the world than taking a country to war, right?”
And Linklater said the people who were in the muck of war have approved of his film’s viewpoint.
“We’re in an area that’s political, but I’m very happy with the way vets have taken to it,” he said. “The ones who have seen it really respect that it gives them a lot of time and space, and captures the love/hate thing a lot of people who go through the military feel … . You can be extremely patriotic, love your country and still be complaining about things in the military.” That age thing
Linklater is 57, but his films, even those in recent years, have a youthful perspective to them.
So working with actors who are about his age — Cranston, Fishburne and Carell 61, 56 and 55, respectively — was also something new for Linklater. “It was so fun to work with my contemporaries,” Linklater said with a laugh. “I’ve done a lot of more youthful films, but we get each other’s jokes, our references. We can mention some obscure ’60s cartoon, and we all were picking it up.”
Still, Linklater had to change his directorial approach a bit.
“Young people, I think, look up to you. Veteran actors, you have to kind of win their respect,” he said. “They don’t give you the benefit of the doubt.
“I wanted to push these guys, so you just have to make it really clear how much you care and how much you’ve thought about it. You’ve got to earn their trust … . We had each other’s backs, like I’m not going to make a fool of them, and I really do have a vision for the piece. There was a lot of trust there from everybody, and so they could push themselves and try some stuff and be vulnerable and feel comfortable. It’s a delicate thing, especially with the more experienced actor.” Finding an audience
At first glance, “Last Flag Flying” seems like the kind of movie destined for awards-season and box-office success.
After all, the topic of grieving families hungering to find out exactly what happened to their loved ones “over there” is a compelling tack. It’s especially relevant with the recent killing of Green Beret Sgt. La David Johnson and his three fellow soldiers in a military mission in Niger. The resulting controversy over how Johnson’s widow, Myeisha, was addressed by President Donald Trump echoes some of the emotions Carrell’s character feels as he pieces together what happened to his son.
“Yeah, we were like, ‘Trump should not be publicizing our movie so well,’ ” Linklater said with a laugh. “But I also said he should have waited two more weeks. By the time the movie really comes out, there will be some new outrage … . But it’s a perpetual cycle of the relationship between the military and those who serve. Yes, indeed, someone signing up for military service is signing up for (death) as a possibility. But the families really aren’t. That’s who’s left to grieve and deal with it. That’s what’s so sad.”
So far, reviews have been mostly positive, with the Los Angeles Times calling the movie “warm, ribald and elegiac.” But the track record for recent war-themed films has been spotty.
“American Sniper” did well in 2014, receiving six Oscar nominations and winning one. On the flip side, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” was a critical and financial bomb last year, and the better-received but still struggling “Thank You for Your Service” hasn’t exactly been attracting sell-out crowds this fall.
Whatever happens with “Flag” in the broad sense, Linklater is happy that those who have been touched by tragedies similar to those in the movie seem to be responding well. He said, “I’ve had some screenings where people come up to me after and say, ‘I lost my dad in Vietnam’ or someone who just lost their brother-in-law in Iraq or Afghanistan like three weeks before … and they found the movie very healing in some way.”