Flag Day

Once, a few years ago, I was hav­ing break­fast with a cou­ple, friends of a friend, who were com­plete strangers to me, when the boyfriend announced, loud enough for the next booth to hear, that he had recent­ly giv­en his girl­friend chlamy­dia. He was mak­ing a point, I think, about STDs and roman­tic mis­ad­ven­ture being a part of life or some­thing, and must have thought he was com­ing off as an edgy and self-dep­re­cat­ing racon­teur, but he could imme­di­ate­ly tell from the way his girlfriend’s face went white that he had made a huge miscalculation.

In that moment, I saw so clear­ly, as if in a divine rev­e­la­tion, how he could have sal­vaged the anec­dote and his dig­ni­ty: Imme­di­ate­ly say two more things in a sim­i­lar vein, but ten to twen­ty per­cent more ridicu­lous, so he could plau­si­bly claim to have said the chlamy­dia thing as a goof. I gave my scout­mas­ter chlamy­dia, too. And I gave my great-aunt rick­ets. Some­times the only way out is deep­er in.

I spent a lot of time think­ing about that guy as I was watch­ing Flag Day, Sean Penn​’s direc­to­r­i­al fol­low-up to The Last Face. ​“Nev­er trust a bas­tard born on Flag Day.” This total­ly authen­tic bit of Amer­i­can folk wis­dom comes ear­ly on in Flag Day’s inter­minable first act, in ref­er­ence to John Vogel (Penn), a high-liv­ing, big-dream­ing, com­pul­sive liar whose charis­ma cap­ti­vates even as he leaves a trail of bounced checks and bro­ken promis­es in his wake.

Even­tu­al­ly an arson­ist, a bank rob­ber and a coun­ter­feit­er, he leaves a lega­cy of ash­es for his chil­dren, Jen­nifer and Nick (played by Penn’s real-life daugh­ter Dylan and son Hop­per as teens and adults), par­tic­u­lar­ly Jen­nifer, who, liv­ing with her recov­er­ing-alco­holic moth­er, falls under his spell, then tries to break it.

Why Flag Day? Because Vogel is Amer­i­ca, stu­pid. In voiceover, Jen­nifer tells us that her father loved Flag Day because it was like the whole coun­try was cel­e­brat­ing his birth­day(?), and repeat­ed mon­tages of fire­works, patri­ot­ic parades and flags under­score the point. All of these fire­works, parades and flags are obvi­ous­ly cel­e­bra­tions of Inde­pen­dence Day; the word ​“Flag Day” does not appear in the mem­oir ​‘Flim-Flam Man’ by the real-life Jen­nifer Vogel.

Why would it? Flag Day isn’t a real hol­i­day. This movie prac­tices a form of gaslight­ing not seen since the Leap Day episode of 30 Rock. Did Penn believe that if he used Inde­pen­dence Day in the movie that he would have to pay some­body roy­al­ties? And decide instead to use a knock­off hol­i­day that isn’t under copy­right? I lit­er­al­ly can­not con­ceive of a more plau­si­ble explanation.

Sean Penn used to be able to give per­for­mances with an alchem­i­cal bal­ance of dan­ger­ous cock­i­ness and wormy need, like in At Close Range or The Fal­con and the Snow­man. In Flag Day, he doesn’t have a direc­tor who can help him find the right mix­ture, or else has lost the abil­i­ty entire­ly. He’s either larg­er-than-life, with a hair-trig­ger tem­per and ele­vat­ed taste for clas­si­cal music (“Gimme my GOD­DAM Chopin record!”, he screams in one domes­tic dis­pute), or else total­ly pathet­ic, slip­ping into anoth­er one of his ade­noidal voic­es, like in I Am Sam or Milk, when­ev­er the age­ing and now-pathet­ic Vogel insists to his daugh­ter that he’s an ​“entre­pre­neur.”

Every time he does some­thing phys­i­cal you can see him act­ing so damn hard: the exag­ger­at­ed wary flex when he slumps his shoul­ders; the telegraphed vio­lent dis­com­fort when he stabs his fork at a plate of eggs. The mate­r­i­al he’s giv­en his daugh­ter Dylan is shrill and screamy, but every­one in this movie is doing career-worst work. Eddie Marsan has one scene and not enough time to decide on an accent. Josh Brolin shows up look­ing as swole as Ron Perl­man and has eight lines of dia­logue; they are the eight worst line read­ings of his estimable career.

I googled this movie imme­di­ate­ly after the screen­ing and Miles Teller was still list­ed among the top-billed cast; he’s not in it, and I can’t think of what role in the final cut he would have dropped out of.

What hap­pened here? It feels as if a whole sub­plot was cut, then the movie was padded back out with as much flash­back-sequence B‑roll as pos­si­ble. It takes for­ev­er to real­ly get going; 30-year-old Dylan Penn plays more than half her scenes as a teenag­er in unflat­ter­ing wigs. (Hop­per Penn is bare­ly in the film but fares even worse; his five-o-clock shad­ow is con­spic­u­ous in the scenes in which he plays a teenag­er, he looks like Andy Sam­berg and Jor­ma Tac­cone in Hot Rod.)

The scenes of Jennifer’s child­hood are end­less mon­tages, with repet­i­tive blown-out hap­py-fam­i­lies mem­o­ries and bla­tant Ter­rence Mal­ick ripoffs of the same hand caress­ing the same strands of wheat from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent angles, and the whole thing is tied togeth­er with pre­ten­tious and solecis­tic voiceover deliv­ered by Dylan Penn and sure­ly writ­ten by her father as they laboured to sal­vage the movie in the edit.

This is a cathar­tic Bad-Dad apolo­gia from an IRL divorced dad with a lot of demons – a kind of fam­i­ly reen­act­ment ther­a­py ses­sion, in which Sean Penn and his adult chil­dren remake At Close Range, only with him in the Christo­pher Walken crim­i­nal-pater­fa­mil­ias role and his adult chil­dren step­ping into the shoes of Sean and his broth­er Chris. But it’s incred­i­bly self-aggran­dis­ing of Sean Penn to ele­vate his neu­roses about his fail­ures as a father into such a histri­on­ic state­ment about Amer­i­ca dreaming.

To be fair, there are laughs to be had in Flag Day, moments where Penn’s ban­ty per­for­mance and Vogel’s extreme­ly unlike­ly dia­logue har­monise to a pitch of maybe-inten­tion­al absur­di­ty. But Penn saves these moments for him­self and him­self alone – how ungen­er­ous of him, to leave the impres­sion that only his ass is covered.