They all sank like a stone.....a few of them just plain stank.....
Last year director Ang Lee unveiled his exquisitely crafted film version of the celebrated Ben Fountain novel.......all about a young soldier whose impulsive act of heroism in the Iraqi war envelops him and his fellow soldiers in a garish public relations circus held at the 2004 Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game halftime.......not merely an anti-war polemic, the book cast a sardonic, rueful eye on American society's compartmentalizing the war and those who fought it into pop culture nuggets to be trotted out at sporting events, then quickly forgotten.
It sank like a stone.......but perhaps for different reasons than those clumsy movies from a decade ago.....
Fountain's novel was a dazzling effort, deeply felt in its treatment of the war-shocked Billy and blisteringly witty in its satire of a careless, greedy, consumer oriented homeland that embraced Billy only for a quick feel-good moment of comfort before the next quarter of the game starts.....
Ang Lee remains dutifully faithful to all these elements in the book and he's an extraordinary visual artist. But directing in subdued, measured tones, he lacks the sheer energy and anger and hot blood to replicate the effect of the book. This movie needed a live wire social satirist for a director........not a painter of pretty pictures.
In a way, it took us all the way back to l970 and the release of Mike Nichols anxiously awaited film version of Joseph Heller's "Catch 22"......which we all dreamed would be the funniest, most excoriating anti-war film ever made. It was not.......Nichols' visually fussy, carefully posed and calculated direction drained the film of any humor or anger......juiceless and proud of itself, the film looked ready for a magazine cover, not a movie screen. (Ironically, the movie "Catch 22" should been had already gone into release a few months earlier.....the raggedy, slapdash, improvised "MASH" from Robert Altman...)
And that's our theory on "Billy Lynn's" downfall.......it needed the equivalent of a Robert Altman to direct it with go-to-hell abandon.......instead, in Ang Lee, it got the equivalent of Mike Nichols.......meticulous craft, but no real moxie....and not much of movie.
Specialist Billy Lynn and his fellow Bravo company soldiers, forever changed and matured beyond their years by the horrors of battle, wander through Dallas stadium bemused, entertained and ultimately outraged by the galactic gulf that separates them from civilian America. They're lionized like temporary movie stars in a country that's wrapped itself in patriotism like a comforting snuggie, but holds little or no interest, empathy or understanding for the young men tossed by George Bush into the Middle East meat grinder.
Billy and the Bravos have been reduced to convenient, extra window dressing while Beyonce and Destiny's Child belt out their hits at the halftime.......and after the show and the game, the crowds can feel good about themselves and hit the shopping malls.....and not think about the war until the next sporting event.....
Lee's studied direction never engages you like it should and its grounded, stately style only serves to make the more fanciful satire of Ben Fountain's prose fall flat. (In the book, the Bravos are regularly assaulted by the stadium maintenance goons with more ferocity than the Iraqi insurgents....in the film, it comes off as weird and random...)
The film also suffers from serious miscasting errors.......as Billy's physically and emotionally damaged older sister, Lee lazily cast the overrated Kristen Stewart, no doubt thinking the one and only emotion in her skill set, morose irritation, would suffice for the role. But the worst bit of stunt-casting involves Steve Martin as Norm Oglesby, the gladhanding, greedy lizard who owns the Cowboys. In years gone by, this would be a role tailor made for the late Pat Hingle, Ed Begley, Burl Ives, or even Orson Welles........Martin skims across the character like he would in a 'Saturday Night Live' skit, catching the friendly phoniness, but never digging deep enough to bring out the ruthless creep lurking behind the mask.
Billy himself is ably embodied by Joe Alwyn with just the right mixture of wonderstruck naivete and melancholic, battle-hardened experience. The true actor MVP here: Garret Hedlund methodically stealing every scene he's in playing Billy's Sergeant Dime, expertly skewering any clueless red-state boobs who dare to patronize him and his men. (It's a damn shame his and Alwyn's face-off with Steve Martin gets weakened and undercut by Martin's uninteresting, low-wattage performance.)
Having unloaded all that off our chest, we'd still declare "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" worth at least one viewing......and no, we've no intention of blah-blah-blahing about Ang Lee's shooting the film in that super-dooper fast frame technique that nobody except film festival invitees ever got to see. We base our musings strictly on the regular old DVD......as such, the BQ stands at attention with 2 salutes for 'Billy Lynn' (**)........we don't mind if you skip the movie, but do NOT skip Ben Fountain's book.....for the book, we fire off 4 stars...(****)
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