Richard Linklater (2017)
In Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973), adapted by Robert Towne from a 1970 novel of the same name by Darryl Ponicsan, two US Navy ‘lifers’ – Billy ‘Badass’ Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Richard ‘Mule’ Mulhall (Otis Young) – are assigned to escort a much younger sailor, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid), to naval prison. Released in American cinemas in the very same month as The Last Detail was Mark Rydell’s Cinderella Liberty, also based on a Ponicsan novel. His output has (according to Wikipedia) been less prolific in the years since but in 2005 Ponicsan published Last Flag Flying, in which the protagonists of The Last Detail are reunited for the first time in more than thirty years. They repeat the route of their original journey, from Virginia to Maine, but on a mission very different from before. Larry Meadows’s son has been killed while serving in Iraq. Meadows’s two ex-minders join him in bringing the young man’s body home for burial.
Richard Linklater’s film of Last Flag Flying, with a screenplay that the director co-wrote with Ponicsan, is and isn’t a sequel to The Last Detail. The principals, as before, are one black and two white men, the younger of whom served time in military prison. Whereas Badass Buddusky has been reincarnated as Sal(vatore) Nealon, the names of the other two are semi-retained: Larry Meadows has become Larry Shepherd, nicknamed ‘Doc’; Mule is Richard Mueller rather than Richard Mulhall. Doc did time in the brig but wasn’t a lone offender: he took the rap for Sal and Mule, though not before they’d taken him to a brothel to lose his virginity – another echo of the Ashby picture. The threesome – or, at least, the actors playing them – are now closer together in age. More important, Linklater’s characters got to know each other in the 1970s not over the course of a few days between eastern seaboard states, but as marines serving in Vietnam.
That virtually guarantees that Last Flag Flying on screen is a more overtly political piece than The Last Detail – even though the latter came out during the Vietnam War (and at a time when it wasn’t unusual for books and films ostensibly about something else to be construed as metaphors for Vietnam). Moved to write his follow-up novel by anger at the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Darryl Ponicsan was no doubt willing to rework Last Flag Flying so that a misconceived American military campaign became the setting of the story’s significant past as well as its present. The Last Detail was hardly an advertisement for a career in the services. Both older sailors found a kind of negative security in navy life but the film managed to imply that harsh injustice was inherent in that life: Meadows, for example, was getting a very stiff prison sentence (eight years) for a very petty crime (he stole $40 from a charity collection box). Jack Nicholson’s Badass Buddusky, a bitterly screwed-up man, had plenty to say for himself. Unlike Sal Nealon, however, he wasn’t a predictable political pontificator. This tendency of Sal’s – shared, to a lesser extent, by the new Mule – is a vexing feature of Last Flag Flying though not, alas, its only one.
Sal (Bryan Cranston) runs a bar in Norfolk, Virginia. Mule (Laurence Fishburne) is a clergyman at a Baptist church in the same state. Doc (Steve Carell) is a paper pusher at the naval prison in Portsmouth, Maine where he was once an inmate. The three of them travel first to Arlington, where Larry Jr is to be interred in the National Cenetery. According to the military authorities, he died a hero’s death in combat. In the morgue, where he talks with Doc and the others, Larry Jr’s army colleague Washington (J Quinton Johnson) is persuaded to admit how his friend really died – shot in the back of the head, as he was buying Coca-Colas in a store, by an Iraqi sniper. Appalled to learn the truth of his son’s killing (and to behold Larry Jr’s shattered face, which he insists on being shown), Doc determines to take the body back to the family home in New Hampshire. Larry Jr will be buried alongside his mother, whom Doc lost to breast cancer just a few months previously.
The film comes across less as a spiritual successor to The Last Detail than as a ragbag of stuff from other movies and movie sub-genres. The black comedy elements of corpse transport echo Little Miss Sunshine, though it’s hard to appreciate the funny side here: Steve Carell’s stricken face, when Doc is confronted with Larry Jr’s lack of one, stays in your mind. The trio’s purchase and use of their first mobile phones are part of the superannuated-buddies-reunion (Last Vegas-type) thread – even though Sal, Mule and Doc are late-middle-aged rather than geriatric. The renaming of Mulhall as Mueller is for the sake of a single joke: homeland security gets the idea that the non-white reverend is a mullah. These bits of perky sitcom sit uncomfortably with the film’s more solemnly pretentious aspects. Perhaps people will take the tragicomic mix as evidence of richness but the laughter and clucks of sympathy were isolated in the Odeon Leicester Square auditorium at the London Film Festival screening of Last Flag Flying I attended. This viewer felt almost continuously uncomfortable with the insecure tone.
The changes of register are crudely calculated and the means whereby Linklater and Ponicsan engineer supposedly moving moments shameless. Their favourite tactic is delaying revelations incredibly. At the start, Doc walks into Sal’s bar and reintroduces himself; they talk and Doc spends the night there before he and Sal drive to Mule’s church. It’s not until they’re having lunch with Mule and his wife Ruth (nicely played by Deanna Reed-Foster) that it emerges why Doc has decided to renew acquaintance after thirty years. Even then, it’s only by way of polite replies to Ruth’s questions that, having first told the company he’s married with a son, Doc admits he’s now widowed and childless. We realise, about two seconds after he first appears on screen, that he’s hyper-unassuming and socially tentative (so much so you doubt he’d have taken the initiative to seek out Sal in the first place). But it’s ludicrous that, over the course of hours, the exuberantly blunt Sal hasn’t asked Doc to explain his reappearance. There’s similar nonsense at the climactic funeral for Larry Jr. His father has been insisting that he be buried not in military uniform but in his graduation suit. Having persuaded Doc to change his mind, Washington hands him, after the funeral, a letter from his son. This in-the-event-of-my-death missive not only expresses his loving gratitude to his father but also confirms his preferred coffin-wear – military uniform is-what-Larry-Jr-would-have-wanted. Why wasn’t the letter handed over sooner? Actually, you don’t ask this question because the answer is so obvious. The funeral is all about wardrobe payoffs: at the last moment, Sal and Mule decide to wear military uniform for the occasion too. You don’t ask either how they get hold of it at a few minutes’ notice.
The image of Sal and Mule saluting Larry Jr’s stars-and-stripes-covered coffin affirms the unbreakable bonds of men who were brothers in arms – and is typical of the sentimental evasions of Last Flag Flying. One of the potentially interesting stops on the trio’s road-and-rail-trip is a visit to the elderly mother of a marine they served with in Vietnam. Like Doc, this bereaved mother (ninety-two-year-old Cicely Tyson) has been on the receiving end of a false account of her son’s death – but this lie has endured for decades. Sal, Mule and Doc propose to tell her what really happened but, when the moment arrives, realise the distress that would cause and keep the truth to themselves. Their discretion may not be comparable to the military authorities’ whitewashing but it’s a pity the film can’t be tough enough to let us see the heroes recognise, or hear them reflect on, the difficulties of candour. Richard Linklater is contrastingly cavalier in his excoriation of army top brass – represented by a colonel (Yul Vazquez) who is waxwork-like until he abruptly switches into yelling overdrive.
Bryan Cranston is a very able actor but, since making the move from Breaking Bad into cinema, he comes over as a self-approving one too. He may be especially pleased with himself here because he’s playing the Jack Nicholson role but the effect is very different. Nicholson characteristically put on a show as Buddusky in The Last Detail but, in one of his finest performances, he also brought out the real fury and despair of this profane, cynical joker. Cranston, although his face is impressively lived-in, is shallow in comparison. It’s sometimes hard to tell if the pomposity that Laurence Fishburne transmits as Mule is a quality of the character or the actor. One convincing detail is the way that Mule, in spite of himself, often can’t helped being amused by Sal – his foulmouthed, anti-religious, unmarried polar opposite. Beside Cranston and Fishburne, Steve Carell looks unnatural – the spectacles and moustache make him too emphatically insignificant – but he does the most likeable work of the three. Carell’s portrait of Doc is well judged and sincerely felt. He makes a fine job of the post-funeral sequence, which Richard Linklater ensures is pleasingly diminuendo. This scene is also a relief because it’s the last one. At just over two hours, Last Flag Flying feels twice as long as The Last Detail, though in fact there’s only twenty minutes between them.
9 October 2017
