I finally saw: Last Flag Flying

Whoa! Two days in a row!

Like Sharknado, which I wrote about yesterday, this was also one of the three films I watched on Friday when I was sick. The other one, the Kevin Hart vehicle Die Hart, I will not write about -- and not because I liked it so much that I just couldn't think of anything to say about it. (Plus, I can't have "finally seen" it because it only came out this year.)

The reasons the 2017 film Last Flag Flying qualifies as an "I finally saw" are:

1) I think of myself as a Richard Linklater completist, or at least a late-career Linklater completist. I still haven't managed to get myself in front of The Newton Boys, The Bad News Bears or Me and Orson Welles, but I'd seen everything since 2008 -- everything except this. Yes, even Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

2) It has a personal connection for me that goes back to college.

You probably heard, since it seemed to be pretty talked about to the extent that this film was talked about at all, but Last Flag Flying was envisioned as a "spiritual sequel" to the 1973 Hal Ashby film The Last Detail. Actually, I suppose it was called an "unofficial sequel," because the book it was based on, written by co-screenwriter Darryl Ponsican, was a sequel to the book Ashby adapted for his film. Except, the characters don't have quite the same names. One character who was called Larry Meadows is now called Larry Shepherd, a second character once called Richard Mulhall is now Richard Mueller, and then the third character has a new name entirely: Sal Nealon instead of Billy Buddusky. The reason for these seemingly unimportant yet slightly confusing changes may be known to someone, but not to me.

Those characters were played by Randy Quaid and Steve Carell, Otis Young and Laurence Fishburne, and Jack Nicholson and Bryan Cranston, respectively. Their races, their fundamental personality types and the dynamic between them are all intact between the two movies, so the slight name changes just cause us to scratch our heads more than anything else.

The personal significance of The Last Detail is not that it was made in the year I was born, but thanks for reminding me I'm turning 50 in four months. 

No, the significance of The Last Detail to me personally is that I saw it in college, shown in a lecture hall as an evening activity that tried to prevent students from going out and getting plastered. We did go out and get plastered much of the time, but on this occasion, two friends and I saw the Ashby movie.

And because we'd been a trio of guys going to see it -- a trio who lived together our sophomore year, though I think this was freshman year -- we ended up mapping our personalities on to the characters in the film as a bit of a joke that stayed with us throughout our four years, mentioned only infrequently but still good for a laugh amongst us. 

It was obvious Bryan was the Nicholson character, a guy with attitude and chutzpah and good at charming the ladies. (I can't actually remember if that character charmed the ladies because I haven't seen The Last Detail since then, but Nicholson certainly had that reputation in general.) The character who became Sal Nealon is not particularly successful with the ladies in Last Flag Flying, but this is 30 years later and he's not the young buck he once was. But Bryan did have a bit of a physical resemblance to Nicholson, less so to Cranston, though they do share the same first name.

Nico was Mulhall/Mueller, who in both cases was nicknamed Mule. Nico was white just like Bryan and me -- still is -- but there was something about his personality that made him seem like a good match for Mule. There may have been an actual reason -- was Nico dating a Black girl or something? -- or it may have just been that I was such an obvious match for the other character that Mule was the one left over for him. 

Yep, I was the obvious match for the Randy Quaid character, the virgin, who loses his virginity to a prostitute in the movie, and has a comically premature ejaculation. 

I'm not going to comment on any of the other similarities -- though it's probably worth clarifying that I did not lose my virginity to a prostitute. However, the reality is, I looked almost exactly like Randy Quaid looked in this film.

I'm not going to put up a picture of myself either from the time or now, but if you want to know what I looked like in 1992, which is probably when this viewing occurred, here is a pretty good idea:

I'm the one on the left.

In the movie, Mule and Billy -- whose own nickname is Badass, which Bryan loved -- are escorting Larry from Norfolk, Virginia to the military prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. (Did I mention these guys were military?) It seems that Larry was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in military prison for stealing $40 from a charitable fund. I guess 50 years ago, $40 would be more like $250 today. So yes, a capital crime indeed.

(Incidentally, Portsmouth was another personal connection for me, since I worked in the summers on an island off Portsmouth, and Portsmouth was where we spent our one day off per week.)

Since I have zero instances of theft on my record, the similarities between me and Larry Meadows ended at that point. But to my credit, I willingly accepted the Larry assignation. By 19 perhaps I had already lost any of my illusions that I could ever be Jack Nicholson.

So in the six years since Last Flag Flying was released, curiosity alone should have gotten me in the door even if Richard Linklater hadn't. But I'd heard this was a quizzical choice by Linklater to say the least, and perhaps by the time I'd seen Bernadette in 2019, it felt unwise to go back and dig up other quizzical Linklater choices.

Well, I really liked this movie.

For starters, the actors are great. Cranston isn't Nicholson but he really captures the guy's rough and rascally edges. He puts all his skills and technique into this one, and instead of that looking like a lot of work, it looks effortless. Fishburne's character undergoes the most changes of any of the three, as he's now a pastor instead of a rascal like his cohort, but he indulges in some moments that remind us of the old Mule, artfully dropping the word "motherfucker" when the occasion calls for it.

Carell also captures the mousy quintessence of Larry. I don't think of myself at all like Steve Carell, but he's definitely got the spirit of that virgin thief down pat. But he's also a figure of great tragedy in terms of the particulars of this story -- fresh off the death of his wife, he's also just lost his son in Iraq, and it's their transport of the body that makes up this film's eastern seaboard road trip. Carell probably has the least acting to do of any of the three, but his internalized quality really serves the material well and becomes emotionally potent.

But then I also really just liked Linklater's dialogue. I think Linklater's writing is sometimes accused of trying too hard, the way people accuse Kevin Smith of trying too hard. But I really think they both can be natural and sharp when they want to be, replicating the way people really talk more often than they are given credit for. The script is also clever about the era in which it is supposed to take place, 2003, as the characters each buy cell phones for the first time, and try to make sense of Eminem on the radio. 

And the story just worked for me. A road trip is always a sturdy armature for a script, and when you combine it with the reunion of a motley crew of friends, that armature only strengthens. However, this movie wouldn't be what it is without an undercurrent of deep melancholy, not only in terms of the tragedies that have befallen Larry, but in terms of the changes in personality and -- in a way, yes -- the tragedies that have befallen the others as they've aged. 

As it was for those characters, encountering each other again for the first time in three decades since their first adventures, it's just more than 30 years since I watched that movie with my own two cohorts back in college. I saw them both at Nico's wedding in I want to say 1998, and then I saw Nico again sometime in the early 2000s in Los Angeles. I haven't seen Bryan in those 25 years since 1998 and I haven't been in touch with either of them in nearly that long.

Last Flag Flying made me think how nice it would be to meet up with both of them on a road trip, and make sense of where our lives have taken us.