Last Flag Flying
What is the value of a comforting lie? That’s the question at the heart of Last Flag Flying, Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to 1973’s The Last Detail, in which three Vietnam vets reunite after decades apart to bury a casualty of the Iraq War. None of them can quite agree on how much truth can be humanely dispensed in the wake of a tragedy. Fuck if I know either, and fuck if Linklater knows, but he sure is willing to puzzle it out. Linklater’s three Vietnam vets are played by Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne. Cranston goes big with his performance, Carell goes small, and Fishburne does both. The end result is a stellar ensemble wrangling heavy emotional beats and novelistic dialogue; on their long, strange funerary journey, the three engage in a great deal of comradely bullshitting, some soul-searching, and one of the funniest exchanges in close proximity to a corpse I’ve ever seen.
by Ben Coleman