Griefs past and present

In director-writer Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, it’s 2003 and Vietnam veteran Doc (Steve Carell) has just learned that his Marine son was killed in Iraq. Doc convinces his two Vietnam compadres, Sal (Bryan Cranston) and Rev. Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), to go on a road trip to retrieve the body. Convincing is necessary: They’re not best friends so much as people who’ve experienced the same war trauma together.

This is a movie from the man behind Boyhood and the Before Trilogy, so don’t go in expecting a lot of plot beyond two hours of conversation. “It’s my kind of war movie: talking and no battles,” said Linklater after the film’s first press screening at the New York Film Festival. Later he added about his aversion to plots: “I think when you think of your life, you think of moments mostly.”

Linklater sprinkles the film with cultural details to anchor it in a place and time, like having the men get their first cell phones. Another true-to-life detail: The military has banned photos or media coverage of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base from overseas. (Today the Pentagon allows photos if the family agrees to them, but it didn’t in 2003.) The three Vietnam vets see that measure as another way for the government to hide the costs of war from the public.

Vietnam left the three characters cynical, and they process the death of Doc’s son as they view it through Vietnam-colored lenses. Predictably, Doc is angry and questions the value of his son’s sacrifice on a mission he doesn’t understand. Sal, a salty Marine, inflames Doc’s cynicism—Sal gives the movie its R rating with his relentless profanities, expletives, and crude jokes.

Mueller left behind profanities, drugs, and prostitutes after the war when he found Christ and became a preacher. That transformation drives Sal crazy: He can’t quite believe it’s genuine. Mueller begins as a typical Hollywood depiction of a Christian, holier-than-thou and stodgy, but grows in complexity as the movie progresses. Sal regularly pesters him with incendiary questions about God and about why evil happens.

A movie set in 2003 might not seem especially urgent right now, since the Iraq War has faded from public consciousness. But military families today still get the same bewildering news the fictional Doc receives: a relative killed by an enemy who could be in civilian clothes or pressing a detonator from a distance. On Oct. 1, for instance, the Pentagon announced that an improvised explosive device killed yet another U.S. service member in Iraq. How can surviving families process such deaths?

That’s the central question for Doc, a character exceptionally portrayed by Carell, who will likely garner award nominations. Linklater perfectly manages Doc’s character arc—building days of parental grief and anger to a moment of catharsis where Doc is shaking with laughter at one of Sal’s crude jokes. Strangely enough, that’s one of the more moving parts of the film.

“That’s my view of the world, tragic and comic right on top of each other,” said Linklater.

The first half of the movie can come across as another anti-war, Michael Moore–flavored project and is occasionally marred by overly theatrical speeches about Vietnam. But ultimately the film is sincerely patriotic—a hard-won patriotism coming from those whose government abused their trust.

Linklater adds a moral twist as the three veterans wrestle throughout the trip with their own past wrongdoing and realize that none of them can right those wrongs. Their country can’t restore what was lost to them, and neither can they restore what they destroyed for others. Last Flag Flying is a story of American optimism even when you and your country have failed, and of laughing even when eyes are heavy with grief.