Last Flag Flying is worth looking for

For my money Hal Ashby was, if not the greatest, then certainly the most consistent American director of the Seventies. From The Landlord (1970) to Being There (1979) he scarcely put s foot wrong. One of his earlier efforts was The Last Detail (1973), a fine and somewhat overlooked film, in which veteran sailors Jack Nicholson and Otis Young have the job of escorting a young offender (Randy Quaid) to the brig. Given his youth and naivete they decide to show him a good time along the way.

The Last Detail was based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan, as is Last Flag Flying. It also concerns two older servicemen – in this case Marines – acting as surrogate mentors to a younger man. So in that sense this Richard Linklater film is a sequel of sorts to the original; Linklater has referred to it as a ‘spiritual sequel’.

Sal (Bryan Cranston), Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) and Doc (Steve Carrell) served in Vietnam in 1973; possibly a nod to The Last Detail which was made in that year. They have lost touch, but Doc turns up out of the blue at Sal’s bar. He takes Sal to see Mueller who has now found religion and become a pastor. As they reminisce at Mueller’s house Doc drops a bombshell; his son has been killed in Iraq and he wants his old comrades to help him bring him home for burial.

When he finds out how his son died Doc decides to forego burial at the National Cemetery in Arlington and instead decides to take him back to Massachusetts for burial. So, aided by Sal and Mueller, and with his son’s Army buddy (J.Quinton Johnston) representing the Marines, they travel cross country to lay the boy to rest.

Part of my issue with Last Flag Flying is how uneven the film is. At times it’s very Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987) with a touch of Grumpy Old Men (1993) thrown in. There are some comic moments – they are mistaken for terrorists, and they treat mobile phones like witchcraft – which just don’t work and seem out of place.

On the other hand, there are moments when it would take a heart of stone not to be moved.

I’m not a huge Linklater fan but he is very good at eliciting genuine human emotion from his cast and with three fine actors it would be strange if he wasn’t able to do that here. There is one glorious scene where the four principals are sitting telling war stories in a railway freight car next to the dead soldier’s coffin. It could be treacly, but it is genuinely funny and melancholic which only serves to highlight the profound sense of loss and waste that characterises the story.

Likewise, a final scene which could have been pure schmaltz is saved and rendered highly moving by Linklater’s handling of thee very good actors.

As a film, it is a little less than the sum of its parts. Fishburne’s performance is outstanding while there’s a wee bit too much of the professional pain in the butt about Cranston for me. Carrell, with perhaps the hardest role, delivers a performance that is absolutely on the money.

Last Flag Flying is a film about the suddenness of loss and the strength of comradeship. It is also something of a meditation on the nature of sacrifice; these Vietnam veterans look on Iraq as the Greatest Generation must have looked on Vietnam. ‘Each generation has its own war’, says Cranston ruefully while the film acknowledges how very little is achieved by those conflicts.

While far from perfect Last Flag Flying is much better than a lot of films out there. It has been overlooked by the awards bodies which is fair enough – they’re not important – but what is more disappointing is the way the film has been overlooked by distributors. You’re going to have to work hard to find a cinema screening this film, but I hope you find it’s worth the effort.

Downsizing - the little film that Oscar forgot

F.Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives however Alexander Payne seems determined to provide some exceptions to that rule. For my money Payne is one of the finest filmmakers of his generation and the notion of second chances is at the heart of his work and his most memorable characters.

Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), Paul Giamatti in Sideways (2004), and even George Clooney in The Descendants (2011) have all been given the chance for do-overs late in life; for Nicholson it is almost in the very last frame. To that list we can now add Matt Damon in Downsizing, a clever and touching social satire which takes Payne into new territory.

Damon is Paul Safranek, a blue-collar hard-working sort of guy who is finding it hard to get by in an America not too far in the future. He and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are just about managing even if the mortgage payments and other pressures of everyday life are getting on top of him.

A radical new scientific development offers an outlet. They can be shrunk to only five inches tall, live in a miniaturised community, and reduce their outgoings to a fraction of their current level. This seems like the ideal solution but, as is often the case in Payne’s films, events conspire to make Paul re-evaluate his priorities and his life.

One of the joys of Downsizing for me is the marriage of a fine script and some remarkable craft skills. Working with his long-time collaborator Jim Taylor, Payne has constructed a script which is sharply satirical, witty, but undeniably human. It takes a number of disparate strands and weaves them together expertly to create an enormously satisfying whole. Like Warren Schmidt, Paul Safranek’s second chance comes late but it is no less rewarding for it.

The execution of the script is near-perfect. Payne eschews CGI or FX shots for the most part; the second half of the film is effectively an homage to Fifties sci-fi and it borrows heavily from the visual tropes of that genre. The miniature community is achieved mostly through oversized sets that could have come straight from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and the rest is achieved through performance and very clever cinematography from Phedon Papamichael who shot Payne’s last film Nebraska (2013)

Matt Damon is terrific in the sort of everyman role in which he excels and there is excellent support from Wiig and a quality cast that includes Christoph Waltz and Hong Chau – both of whom can consider themselves unfortunate to have been passed over for Supporting Actor and Actress nods.