Opening night NYFF: Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying

Richard Linklater follows his Everybody Wants Some!!, an affable college boy sports romp, with Last Flag Flying, a buddy movie with older guys, featuring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, who played a soldier in Vietnam in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, back in the day, good preparation for this role. Three Vietnam vets on the road, what a set up for wild ride with bad boy shades of Last Vegas! Opening the New York Film Festival, the film touches on war, but stays closer to its aftereffects on survivors and their loved ones. Carell’s Larry sets the events in motion, traveling to find Cranston’s Sal, an alcoholic bartender, and Fishburne’s Mueller, a pious reverend. Gathering them together for a road trip, Larry wants these men, who behaved badly together in Southeast Asia, to help him bury his son, just killed in Iraq.

Linklater wrote the script with Darryl Ponicsan, author of the source novel. On opening night, I had a chance to speak to the actors about the movie’s politics of war. In a shocking pink suit, Laurence Fishburne noted his ideas about war are not his place to comment upon; he’s just a guy helping his friend bury his son. As a young marine who was Larry, Jr.’s best friend, J. Quinton Johnson (the Hamilton actor is called Q), similarly emphasized his role in helping Larry deal with his son’s loss. Especially poignant is a scene on the Amtrak when he tells Larry that his son was proud of him. Yul Vazquez plays a superior officer upholding the military’s position to inter the dead marine at Arlington. The film’s heavy, this actor from Cuba offered, he came from repressive regime with his mother.

A man’s movie, “Last Flag Flying” may conceal a male aging metaphor. Breaking Bad’s Cranston in one of his most over the top roles as Sal talks wistfully about the position of his privates when shaving and pulling up his socks. Yet this testosterone laden trip also features some stand out women: a show stealing Cecily Tyson, and Deanna Reed-Foster as Mueller’s wife Ruth, a sober, churchgoing woman who clearly keeps him in line. At Tavern on the Green, the actors partied well into the night. Holding a glass of prosecco, she said, like Ruth, she is a churchgoer, but she could not make a case for sobriety. She laughs when I ask her, did she have a good time making the film. “All those handsome men!”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura