Ang Lee (2016)

‘I salute Ang Lee for making the best film of his career’ is how Armond White concludes his National Review piece on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.  White is a contrarian first and a critic second so his ringing endorsement gives a good idea of the largely negative reception of Lee’s latest by reviewers in North America, where the film, which opened in November 2016, has also fared poorly at the box office.  It will be surprising if its release this side of the Atlantic marks a sea change in its fortunes.  Billy Lynn, although eagerly anticipated, has been conspicuous by its absence not just from awards nominations but, in the UK anyway, even from cinemas:  it opened on 10 February in only a handful of London picture houses.  (I saw it at the Odeon Studios in Leicester Square.)  It’s clear from watching the film that something went wrong.  It’s less easy, for a while anyway, to put your finger on what that something is.

Ben Fountain’s debut novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published in 2012, won several prizes, including a National Book Award.  The main action takes place over a twenty-four-hour period in November 2004.  A group of Iraq War veterans are hailed as heroes back in America, thanks to a firefight with insurgents being recorded on camera.  The courage of nineteen-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn, who dragged a wounded colleague to safety (although the man subsequently died), has received particular public attention.  On their return home, ‘Bravo Squad’, as the media have dubbed them, have been sent on a ‘victory’ tour which will culminate at the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving halftime interval show.  Billy Lynn is increasingly dismayed by the commercialised exploitation of military heroism that he and his unit are caught up in – a travesty facilitated by the American public’s lack of interest in the realities of war.  At the end of the story and in spite of his sister’s desperate efforts to arrange for him to receive an honourable discharge, Billy is set to return to Iraq.  His strong sense of fraternity with his fellow soldiers offers him comfort in that prospect.

I’ve not read the novel but the storyline suggests a withering attack on how George W Bush’s America used and abused its war heroes.  I increasingly got the impression from the film that Ang Lee’s sensibility was in conflict with the material or, at least, with Jean-Christophe Castelli’s script.  (This is Castelli’s first screenplay credit although he worked with Lee, in various capacities, on Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and Life of Pi, as well as on other projects involving James Schamus, Lee’s longstanding collaborator.  Schamus wasn’t, by the way, on the Billy Lynn team.)  Lee’s versatility is well proven but he may be too benign a humanist to work with the grain of Ben Fountain’s ‘sharp satire’ (Wikipedia).  Some of the visual elements at the football stadium convey their sardonic message without needing much help from the director:  Bravo Squad as a quasi-chorus line behind the halftime show headliners, Destiny’s Child; the growing animosity towards the soldiers of the stadium security guards, who, at the end of the evening’s entertainment, set upon them.  The individual satirical targets are a different matter.  Characters such as the veterans’ craven, bullshitting agent Albert (Chris Tucker), making hopeless attempts to seal a movie deal based on the soldiers’ story, and the egregious ‘patriot’ Norm Oglesby (Steve Martin), who owns the Cowboys team, are one-dimensional in the way they’re written.  The (somewhat) more nuanced playing that Lee appears to have encouraged from the actors concerned makes for the worst of both worlds:  the caricatures remain inescapably caricatures but are less lively than they might be.  Crosscutting between fireworks in the football stadium and bombs going off in Iraq makes an unsurprising sarcastic point about Bravo Squad’s demeaning absorption into showbiz spectacle. It might still be an effective point if Billy Lynn had a sustained caustic energy.  Since it doesn’t the juxtaposed explosions are an obtrusive highlight – it’s as if they’re meant not to be obvious at all but a rather brilliant insight.

The acting is patchy.  Joe Alwyn, a Londoner in his mid-twenties, was (according to Wikipedia) cast as Billy Lynn a matter of a few days after graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama – an astonishing opportunity and responsibility for a complete newcomer to the screen.  Alwyn has a likeable open face and sensitivity but he isn’t a strong presence; he often seems to be acting up, rather than radiating, quietly thoughtful innocence.  As Sergeant David Dime, the dynamic and articulate leader of Bravo Squad, Garrett Hedlund again impresses with his vocal range and colour.  It’s not Hedlund’s fault that a press conference – at which Dime, in response to questions, first says what he’d like to say then what he’s expected to say – feels uneasy in the wrong way.  Here too, Lee’s naturalistic style doesn’t seem to make sense:  if Dime really did voice controversial statements to journalists, they would surely have found their way into press reports.  When Billy visits his family in small-town Texas en route to the Dallas Cowboys engagement, his mother has prepared an early Thanksgiving meal because he won’t be at home on the day itself.  Mrs Lynn is meant to be het up and too anxious to please but Deirdre Lovejoy, who plays her, overacts these qualities.  This often happens, of course, when an actor wants to make the most of a small part but you don’t think of it happening in Ang Lee films, and Deirdre Lovejoy isn’t the only offender here.  At the opposite extreme and more unfortunately, the other members of Bravo Squad barely register.

The interesting performances, along with Garrett Hedlund’s, come from Kristen Stewart and Makenzie Leigh, even if the interest results largely from the polar opposition of the two girls they play.  Stewart is Billy’s much troubled sister, Kathryn; Leigh is Faison, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with whom Billy falls in love virtually at first sight.  Kathryn is deeply disappointed that Billy will return to Iraq; Faison, when Billy says he wishes he could run away with her rather than resume active service, is momentarily alarmed by this implied dereliction of a hero’s duty.  Makenzie Leigh thoroughly embodies a stars-and-stripes stereotype, while giving the cheerleader a spark of individuality.   Faison moves at cartoon speed (and Leigh with ease) from eyeing up Billy, to telling him of her deep Christian faith, to having sex with him.  Kristen Stewart is reliably worth watching though she isn’t given enough to do as Kathryn, most of whose communications with Billy take the form of texts.  (He appears to be the only member of Bravo Squad with a mobile phone.)

The sequences in Iraq centre on Billy and the sergeant Virgil ‘Shroom’ Breen (Vin Diesel), a convert to Hinduism, who imparts his beliefs to Billy, though not in a proselytising way.  The firefight and its aftermath, although they’re staged well enough, are uninvolving.  Ang Lee’s singular visualisation of Billy’s efforts to pull the mortally wounded Shroom out of further harm’s way overrides any emotional response to it.  Complaints have been voiced widely about the larger technical innovations of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which David Sims in The Atlantic explains as follows:

‘[Lee filmed] it in a super high-definition format (120 frames per second, five times the speed of a normal film), an odd approach for a film that largely takes place in a football stadium. There are some flashbacks to Iraq, and moments of far grander spectacle during the halftime show, but it’s still a curious choice given that high-definition filmmaking seems to suit CGI creations and fantasy battle sequences far better than ordinary moments of dialogue.’

Ang Lee has been quoted as saying that he opted for the unusual format in order to make the picture a more ‘immersive’ and ‘realistic’ experience for viewers – but how many viewers?  The most puzzling thing about the technical approach here is that, as David Sims goes on to say, Lee’s ‘film mostly won’t be seen in its intended format, since few theaters are equipped with the proper projectors’.

13 February 2017