Last Flag Flying review: Richard Linklater's mature, contemplative look at what war does to a man
Director: Richard Linklater; Starring: Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne. 15 cert, 125 mins.
The new Richard Linklater film arrives in cinemas this week, and it’s about time – but then, most of them are. His Bafta-winning 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-a-twist 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 final blowout. Ponicsan’s follow-up, published in 2005, 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.
Got all that? Good – because it gets more complicated still, as Linklater has his three lead actors lightly mimic their predecessors – so where Ashby’s film had Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid, his has Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne and Steve Carell with a vague whiff of Nicholson, Young and Quaid lingering in the air around them. It’s as if the Texan director has worked out how to shoot déjà vu.
It unfolds in December 2003, which means Iraq, rather than Vietnam, is the conflict looming in the background – although the last generation’s war still echoes loud and clear in the present.
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.
With varying degrees of enthusiasm, both men accept. Sal, the footloose owner of a dive bar, is happy to help an old friend in need, while Richard, a former life-of-the-party turned Baptist minister, is reluctant to reconnect with his hell-raising past. But as the trio’s journey wears on, and they reflect on all that’s changed since their war and all that hasn’t, their long-broken 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 of them die, and the point of it all becomes harder to fathom the longer you grasp for it.
Sal’s approach is to stare down the truth, however bleak, and he has no time for the Marine colonel’s square-jawed talk at the air base of how Doc’s boy “died with honour”. But Richard, with his dog collar fixed in place even when off duty, sees value in the comforting myth, and the film eventually strikes a subtle and delicate peace agreement between these two extremes.
You don’t need a working knowledge of the Ashby film to follow along, but it does help to be aware that Jack Nicholson was in it, insofar as it explains Cranston’s tribute act of a performance – all arching eyebrows, hungry grins and manic tics. It’s undeniably well-observed, but feels less like acting than a party piece. Fishburne gets his character’s low-key pomposity just about right, while Carell plays Doc so downbeat, you sometimes sense he might be about to retract his head into his jacket like a tortoise.
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. And 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.
The secret ingredient could be J Quinton Johnson, who plays the former squad-mate of Doc’s son charged with accompanying his coffin: he’s often hovering on the edge of the most rewarding scenes, including a sequence where the old-timers reflect on their waning virility which dissolves into bittersweet hysterics.
For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.
