Flag Day, review: this father-daughter project won’t help Sean Penn’s directorial career
Is Sean Penn’s new film a fond tribute from a father to his daughter, or just the Hollywood version of Take Your Child to Work Day? The intentions are as flatteringly fuzzy as the glowing 1970s-style camerawork in this adaptation of the American journalist Jennifer Vogel’s memoir Flim-Flam Man, about her strained relationship with her father John, an inveterate crook who makes forays into bank robbery, arson and counterfeiting. Penn has cast his 30-year-old daughter Dylan as Vogel, while he himself plays John, who drifts in and out of her life over the course of 18 years, always with a new scam on the go, and often still bearing the bruises of the last.
Flag Day’s arrival in Cannes comes a little over five years after Penn’s previous directorial effort, the West African-set wartime romance The Last Face, was all but towed out into the bay and scuttled after receiving some of the worst reviews in the recent history of the festival. It therefore comes as no surprise that his latest signals a comprehensive change of tack – though, alas, it still isn’t much good, even though its affection for American strays and outsiders sometimes reminds you of Penn’s great 2007 film Into the Wild.
“Memory reckons itself in blurs and flashes,” a policewoman tells Jennifer in the 1992-set prologue. (In Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s chewy screenplay, a lot of people talk like this.) And blurs and flashes are exactly what we get: lots of dreamy, grainy, country-rock-backed hand-held shots of the faded US heartlands, including the obligatory sequence in which our heroine thoughtfully drags her hand through some wheat.
Cinematographer Daniel Moder has done an extraordinary job of matching the visual texture of 1970s American cinema: you don’t doubt for a second that Jennifer is growing up in the country of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Everything we see looks lived-in – Penn’s face especially, with its horseshoe moustache, wayward hair and forehead creased like an old leather sofa. And the close-ups of Dylan-as-Jennifer have a real paternal tenderness – while if you squint a little, you really could be looking at her mother, Robin Wright.
Yet in adopting a visual style that once went hand-in-hand with innovation and daring, Flag Day’s own lack of either of these things soon becomes conspicuous.
“There are things about your father that you don’t know,” Jennifer’s boozy, resentful mother (Katheryn Winnick) keeps hissing during moments of familial discord. But exactly what these are isn’t readily apparent: he’s obviously a chiselling screw-up, and even as a child, the young Jennifer (Jadyn Rylee) sees him getting into a violent confrontation with burly, leather-jacketed goons. Even so, the film suffers whenever John disappears: Jennifer might be a gift of a role in one sense, but she’s a fundamentally dull and passive character, largely bobbing through her turbulent early adulthood on an even keel, save for one moment of teenage rebellion in which she sets fire to a bin.
Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes: there is a funny conversation in a diner about the evils of drugs in which John spuriously claims lifelong abstinence. In such moments, the project suddenly and charmingly perks up. The rest of the time, ‘flag’ is about right.
15 cert, 108 min. Dir: Sean Penn. In cinemas from Friday
