“If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance from the young Jack Nicholson, a screenplay by Robert Towne (Chinatown) that balances savage political satire with a perceptive view of toxic male friendship, and Ashby’s unique directorial tone, familiar from classics such as Being There and Harold and Maude, which might be described as at once melancholic and sprightly.” Richard Linklater “has characterized the relationship between his film,” Last Flag Flying, which has just premiered at the New York Film Festival, “and Ashby’s as an ‘echo.’ The names and some particulars may have changed, but there’s a continuity of spirit that connects these two movies, adapted from a pair of novels by Darryl Ponicsan that were themselves written thirty-five years apart.”
Keith Uhlich notes that Ponicsan “shares co-screenwriting credit” with Linklater on the new film, “though the character names have been changed as one way of giving the tale its own identity. It’s still difficult to think of the central trio, Nealon (Bryan Cranston), Shepherd (Steve Carell), and Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), as anyone other than Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), Meadows (Randy Quaid) and Mulhall (Otis Young), in large part because Cranston, as the group’s resident hellraiser, seems to be doing an outsize Nicholson impression as opposed to staking out his own territory. And though they fare better in comparison, Fishburne and Carell are similarly surface. These are ‘performances’ first and foremost, and this wreaks havoc with the emotional and sociopolitical undercurrents.”
Justin Stewart, writing for Reverse Shot, disagrees, finding that Last Flag Flying presents “angry, sad, but, in hindsight, wise perspective on the early Iraq War years.” This is a road trip set in 2003, and Doc “initiates it” by revealing “the cause of his soft-spoken sadness—his wife’s recently dead of cancer, and his son, Larry Jr., a Marine, was just killed in Iraq. Sal and a reluctant Mueller agree to accompany Doc to a burial at Arlington, which then becomes an As I Lay Dying–like errand involving a trip to Dover Air Force Base to retrieve the body, and then a road trip to see Larry Jr. buried at home with family after all three grow increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. government’s dishonesty.”
Writing for Screen Slate, Chloe Lizotte grants that this is “a familiar story of the decay of a certain idealized vision of America, told amidst a backdrop of rusty infrastructure, faded photographs, and one deliberately placed Hail to the Thief poster near the end. But where other filmmakers might have reduced Last Flag Flying to didactic, Bush-era talking points, Linklater and co-screenwriter Ponicsan convey these ideas through nuanced characters, fostering an organic camaraderie that belies the depth of their shared history.”
“Linklater is (still) at the top of his technical game,” writes Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker, noting that “there’s a long sequence that plays out in an airport hanger, in which space is divided so well while characters separate and re-converge that I forgot the sequence was locked into one big location over the course of approximately ten minutes. Linklater’s thoroughly worked through his influences to make them serve him without being distractingly quote-y: you’d never guess how many hours he’d spent studying Akerman and Benning, though the Bresson overhead object shots are recognizable.” That said, “I’ll concede: A normal Linklater hang-out movie is mapped on top of a sober Iraq drama, and the mixture doesn’t mesh.”
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Last Flag Flying “is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others,” writes Christopher Gray for Slant, “and it ingeniously folds us into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values. . . . Like Before Midnight, Last Flag Flying is both gimlet-eyed and philosophical enough to question the lasting worth of youthful romanticism.”
The screenplay “toys with the intriguing concept of men who believe in the institution but take issue with the government in control of it,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, “but any profundity is lost in half-speak, surrounded by hackneyed, stagey dialogue and unfunny comedy.”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman agrees that “the themes, of regret and repentance and American lies, are spoon-fed to the audience in a way that’s surprisingly tidy and didactic. . . . Linklater can be a master of drifting naturalism (e.g., Dazed and Confused), but Last Flag Flying, surprisingly, has none of that free-flowing, organic quality.”
For the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “despite poignant moments, particularly in the performances of Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne, the weave of somber introspection, rueful reminiscence, irreverent comedy and sociopolitical commentary feels effortful, placing the movie among the less memorable entries in Linklater's canon.”
More from Eric Kohn (IndieWire, B+), Kyle Pletcher (Film Stage, C+), and Rodrigo Perez (Playlist, B).
“I think in particular when it comes to the Iraq War, history had changed quite a bit,” Linklater tells Steven Zeitchik in the Los Angeles Times. “Look at the [2016] Republican debates. Almost everyone said the war was a mistake—the one guy who didn’t was the one whose brother started it. The culture shifted, like it did on Vietnam. A conservative-ish friend of mine saw this film and he said it felt like ‘liberal patriotism.’ I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I kind of got it. You can question the war but still have all these warm feelings about your country. The guys in the movie talk about it in this one scene—‘I love this country, it’s a great country, but you gotta have a reason to love it.’ And that reason is ‘don’t get lied to.’”
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