In Last Flag Flying, the characters are rarely quiet. This dramedy, with its equal blend of drama and comedy by screenwriter-director Richard Linklater, thankfully lets them talk. And talk. And talk. All this talk burbles up from some deep source, organic and biologic, as the camera and the listener wait — respectfully and attentively, often with great amusement and affection, and just as much heartbreak — as they tell their stories.
This film of three Vietnam veterans who reunite in 2003 is based on Darryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel, Last Flag Flying, and Ponicsan has screenplay co-credit along with Linklater. Decades earlier Ponicsan had written The Last Detail, the basis for a 1973 film starring Otis Young, Randy Quaid and Jack Nicholson. The Last Detail is a powerful, memorable film of Marine buddies in their youthful prime making a road trip to a naval prison. In Last Flag Flying, the 60-something vets, haunted by age, infirmity and cynicism, make a trip of their own, this time to a cemetery. The films correspond with one another too in the use of the road and rails to provide the space for their stories to be told. One could consider this movie a mere sequel, but that would be a mistake. These are not the same characters, not the same names, not the same men now all grown up. And these are just barely parallel circumstances.
Last Flag Flying stands on its own and does not pale in comparison, as some critics have suggested, to its predecessor.
As this film unfolds, we have the time and the permission for slow revelations, for expansion and compression like a lung or like a heart, so the film breathes and beats like a living being — in and out, up and down, deep and broad, close-up and wide, raucous and silent. It both telescopes with extravagant sweep and microscopes with intense detail, all through talk with the power of a human voice to conjure memory and a human face to convey experience.
Bryan Cranston plays Sal Nealon, Lawrence Fishburne plays Richard Mueller, aka “Mule” or “Mauler,” and Steve Carell is Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd. These are three men with Vietnam under their belt but still toxic in their gut, their gung-ho Semper Fi now scoured and soured by disillusion. For these young soldiers, Vietnam was the best of times, but now as old men, it has become the worst of times as their sins there have haunted their every moment since. They’ve not seen one another since that war, but now it’s 2003, and forty years later, Doc has used the internet to locate Sal to invite him along for a road trip to Arlington. Doc wants his old friend to help him bury his son just recently killed in Iraq — indeed, each generation has a war to call its own. They stop on the way to pick up Mule as the threesome reluctantly reunites to help this grieving father. Soon that plan goes awry with revelations about the true nature of the boy’s death in Baghdad.
So far, this might seem like a heavy slog through guilt and contrition, and it certainly has its share of somber and grim realities. But it’s all that talking referenced earlier that makes this an agile, energetic, animated film with an ample share of laughs, both good-hearted and derisive, and more than its share of profanity and obscenity as we would expect from vets who talk.
Vietnam vets I have known seem either to have a lot to say or become mute, never shut up or stay repressed, go on the defensive or go into denial. I once had a lively bookstore discussion with a fellow my age, mid 60s, bit of a scraggly beard, dressed in worn-out army fatigues, bandana headwrap, faded tattoos on his arm, clearly a Vietnam vet still holding on to his time there, still agitating for recognition, still working to release POWs, and perhaps release his own demons too. This was nothing he spelled out explicitly to me, but it was all in his clothing and demeanor as he picked up Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I commented on the book and its justified fame, its powerful story about the ongoing legacy and burdens of that searing war. He asked me if I had been in Nam, and I said no, that I had a medical disability at the time, then also a high lottery number. After we chatted a bit, he said many claim to have been there when they weren’t. He went on to tell me that when men say they have been in Nam, he’ll ask them if they were assigned P-38. If they reply affirmatively — “Oh, yeah, I was on that base,” or “Sure, I was in country in that part of the jungle,” or “Damn right, that was the weapon they gave us” — then he knows they’re liars, just-pretending wannabes. He went on to explain that a “P-38” is military slang GIs have used since World War II, slang for a can opener! His mission now was to root out liars.
These vets in Last Flag Flying — Sal and Mule are Marines, Doc a Navy man with BCD, a Bad Conduct Discharge, though he prefers seeing it as a Better Career Decision — have their own lies to uncover and guilts to lay bare, something considerably more mendacious than a P-38. The things they have been carrying for decades now are deep and menacing indeed.
So up the east coast they go — from Norfolk with stops in Arlington, Dover, New York, Portsmouth — talking all the way, but just as much is revealed from what is not said. There are no cinematic flashbacks, no decades-old images of My Lai or the Tet Offensive, no GIs in steamy jungles, nor GIs in desert sands, though we see occasional TV shots of Saddam Hussein being dragged from that notorious spider hole. These vets talk, cajole, provoke, incite, no cell phones to distract nor deflect, all while they prod and probe their unreliable, time-faded, yet it’s-as-if-it-happened-yesterday memories.
Cranston (Trumbo, “Breaking Bad”) as Sal is an over-the-top marvel of an alcoholic in perpetual motion, maybe too much so. His performance is so out-sized it might be better suited for the stage than the screen. Fishburne (The Matrix, Apocalypse Now) as Mule, a former horndog now a collar-wearing Reverend with Jesus as his Lord and Saviour in his heart rather than multiple Saigon hookers in his bed, is a model of Christian, more like Buddhist, stillness. Carell (The Big Short, Foxcatcher, “The Office”) as the grieving father is the lost one, and indeed maybe Carell underplays it too much. Certainly grief can fell the strongest among us, but his grief is a one-dimensional, almost catatonic state, so that when a slight smile finally flickers across his face, it’s as if you’ve seen a pulse return to what has seemed a corpse.
They are joined by newcomer J. Quinton Johnson (Everybody Wants Some!!, “Hamilton”) as young Marine Lance Corporal Charlie Washington who’s been assigned to accompany the veterans and the body to its final resting place. Charlie had served with Doc’s son and is able to provide stunning new details about the death. He exudes youth and vigor, albeit with a growing cynicism about how the military works — where old men wage wars and young men fight in them, and if they live, they in turn become old men still fighting those same wars.
A scene with these four actors, as they sit and jaw and laugh hysterically in the train baggage car with the coffin between them, is perhaps one of the finest pieces of self-contained ensemble performance I have ever seen. I thought of Shakespeare’s Henry V who roused his troops before the Battle of Agincourt by reminding them of that special bond that soldiers share, so unique that “gentlemen asleep in England will think themselves accursed they were not there.” Likewise, this foursome — this band of brothers in their esprit de corps with one another — convincingly conveys something that we outsiders, those of us with medical deferments and high lottery numbers, can never, ever know.
It’s not a perfect film. The performances are too uneven, unbalanced. The back stories are insufficiently explained. The anti-authoritarian stance is too easy when it’s directed against an officious, platitudinous Marine colonel. There are occasional writerly lapses where Mule’s name is misunderstood as Mullah with the resulting overreaction, or when the geezers buy their first cell phone, or when Sal discovers his favorite rapper Eminem is a white guy. And there’s the milking of emotion, with telegraphing musical cues, where we willingly sit there and know we’re being manipulated.
But so many good things here help the film overcome its flaws.
It’s funny. It’s raw. It’s absurd. It’s complicated. It’s authentic. It’s human.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2017.
