Last Flag Flying

Synopsis: Thirty years after serving together in the Vietnam War, Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carrell), Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and the Rev. Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) reunite to bury Doc's son, a young Marine killed in Iraq. After refusing to have him buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Doc and his buddies take the casket on a trip up the coast to New Hampshire via New York and Boston. Along the way, the three men find themselves coming to terms with their past and present.

It comes as no surprise to find that Last Flag Flying is based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan who wrote the originary text for Hal Ashby’s zeitgeist classic, The Last Detail (1973). This film is about three guys on a road trip. That film was about three guys on a road trip. In this film they are Marines. In The Last Detail they were Navy. Ponicsan’s novel is actually a sequel to the earlier story but director and co-writer Linklater has made enough changes to allow this to be a stand-alone work. This will be perhaps of little relevance to most audiences but in both cases it’s the journey not the destination that matters.

The principal difference is that now the three protagonist are no longer young hell-raisers but late-middle aged men with the craziness of their ‘Nam  days a thing of the past. Doc has lost his wife to breast cancer and his son to Saddam Hussein, Mueller has found God and become a pastor and Sal, still an unreconstructed bad boy, runs a crummy bar, drinking more than he sells. Last Flag Flying is a deftly-drawn reunion movie which uses the road trip template as a setting for the characters to reminisce and reflect on their lives as they re-connect with, challenge, and support each other.

With thoughtful subject-matter, well-written characters and fine performances from the three leads it’s a rewarding journey for us too with Linklater demonstrating his typical clear-eyed restraint and for the most part not falling back on plot or action to supply more interest or entertainment than what his characters provide just by being themselves.  

Both requirements are here in spades but even so the film is too long. Cranston’s Sal, with his unapologetic cynicism is an amusing character but by the latter stages of the trip one can’t help but feel that his quieter fellow-travellers would be, like us, beginning to tire of his booze-soaked schtick.

The film’s ending too is questionable, resolving on a sentimentally patriotic note which, perhaps more so from a non-American point-of-view, seems like an unduly glib change of heart (not to mention questions about who organized the funeral so quickly and where the heck did those splendid but completely unconvincing Marine “blues” come from?). Not as glaring a shift as was the case with the ending of The Deer Hunter (1978) but incongruous nevertheless. Once again this may be a cultural thing but the Iraq war also seems a little too long gone to endow the film (which is set in 2003) with the kind of resonance it should have.

Last Flag Flying is a worthy effort but not one of Linklater's best.

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