Billy Lynn, a 3-D masterpiece, brings our culture wars home; Manchester doesn’t
Ang Lee’s new movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is based on a true story — even though, officially, it is adapted from a best-selling novel by Ben Fountain. The film’s “truth” comes from its sensitivity to two decades of American emotional turmoil that can be felt in our popular culture but has rarely been addressed so affectingly as in this film. That rift can be seen in 19-year-old Army Specialist Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), who returns home to Texas to be honored with his troop, Bravo Company, for his heroic hand-to-hand defense during combat in Iraq. Bravo Company attends a Dallas Cowboys halftime show to support the soldiers, a tribute that reveals sympathies and misunderstandings about the military, patriotism, and duty that have riled the populace ever since the Persian Gulf War and succeeding events — 9/11, the Iraq War, and changes in social perspective — that became unavoidable in the culture wars that erupted around television, movies, sports, and pop music.
Billy Lynn was at the front lines of the culture wars — both as a small-town boy and while serving his country thousands of miles away. Back home, reunited with his loving family, surrounded by his empathetic Bravo Company clan, and besieged by well-wishers, opportunists, and the uncomprehending media, he is forced to reflect on both cultural and real-war anxieties. His bewilderment is condensed during the halftime ceremony, which mixes wartime and peacetime fanfare in an anomalous celebration on Thanksgiving Day.
This big moment is conveyed through Lee’s use of new 3-D technology; a Sony CineAlta F65 4K camera that records 120 frames per second (traditional movie photography displays 24 frames per second). Lee’s hyperrealism is more than a gimmick; he achieves a steadier, you-are-there look — compositions that put a viewer in the emotional circumstance of Billy at the dinner table in his parents’ house, inside a stretch limousine’s awkward expanse, or behind the stage at a football stadium in the midst of gyrating dancers and fireworks. The sensory overload is neatly intercut with flashbacks of wartime trauma — particularly Billy’s attempt to save his sergeant (Vin Diesel) and his face-to-face killing of an Iraqi combatant. The sense of physical and emotional intimacy makes this movie extraordinary. Close-ups of Billy’s bright eyes and unsure expression confront us with the perplexity of post-war agony. Billy cries softly, yet manfully. It’s not simply from stress, and his tears complete the beauty of his youthful sacrifice.
None of Lee’s many literary-adaptation films have had this deep effect or sincerity. The performances (including Kristen Stewart as Billy’s sister, Makenzie Leigh as the cheerleader he connects with, Diesel’s heroic icon, and Garrett Hedlund’s tough and compassionate commanding officer) express a convincing range of culture-war sensitivities, all precisely articulated. The sister’s plea for Billy to desert (“Trash another country, that’s easy. Standing up to your own takes a hero”) sums up liberal anti-war attitudes of recent decades, but Lee, screenwriter Jean-Christophe Castelli, and the cast are more than trendy. They distill culture-war confusion in the characters’ respectful and aggrieved regard of each other. Lee avoids the fractiousness that currently shreds our national unity by envisioning sensitivity and passion that connects us to Billy.
The film’s title metaphor connects to Hollywood’s bygone wartime sentimentality through its suggestion of arduous, personal effort — spiritual striving. This ranks Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk with the nobility of Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero precisely by updating post-war upheaval yet avoiding cynicism. Billy and his commander’s confrontation with a mogul (Steve Martin) presents a remarkable three-sided moral stand-off. When Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child strut and twerk impersonally right by Billy, it’s the most in-your-face, ambivalent Americana any post-9/11 film has ever conveyed. For Lee to capture this through F/X trickery is stunning.
Billy says, “For us, the war has always been real and we never needed cameras to tell us that.” The irony of his young veteran’s reprimand may explain why ignorant reviewers, pledged to meaningless comic-book movie effects, were disoriented from their glib anti-military positions and so condemned this fine film. Using 3-D to show Billy’s alienation from showbiz, America, even from himself (briefly), is worthy of the multi-dimensional concept in Francis Ford Coppola’s experimental One from the Heart as well as Godard’s personal-political assessment in Le Petit Soldat. I salute Ang Lee for making the best film of his career.
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Manchester by the Sea is being overpraised because it indulges American self-pity. All the arrogant liberal indifference to the military, verging on treason or at least insensitivity, that Ang Lee zeroes in on as symptomatic of our contemporary polarization gets displaced in playwright-director Kenneth Lonergan’s melodrama about Lee (Casey Affleck), an anti-social Massachusetts janitor who pities himself throughout mounting family traumas.
Lonergan revisits the same angry-Irish shtick as in his work on Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, plus the same narcissism of his Upper West Side Manhattan political soap opera Margaret. The sentimentality here is so smug and overwrought — complete with surging violin solos and church-organ crescendos between the fist fights and profanity — that some sneaking, anti-working-class condescension is betrayed.
The flashback repeats our era’s lousy sense of narrative structure. The slow-reveal of Lee’s tragic past makes his present inert. Lonergan’s static pace and over-obvious compositions attempt fake “realism,” but each scene looks like an acting-class exercise.
Affleck had Henry Fonda probity earlier this year in The Finest Hours, but here he comes off as a self-pitying twerp (“I can’t beat it!”). His big scene with ex-wife Michelle Williams is a marathon of mutually fumbled schmaltz. The difference between ham-acting and depth can be seen when Lee’s Billy loses himself in a cheerleader’s eyes and whispers “Girl, I could run away with you.” Lonergan sums up working-class, ethnic blundering through phony pathos. None of these supposedly contemporary characters show self-awareness equal to Billy saying, “It’s weird being celebrated for the worst day of your life.” Lonergan’s celebration of ethnic parochialism is unhelpful. Kyle Chandler cuts a quietly robust figure as Lee’s older brother, but Lucas Hedges as the horny nephew Patrick unfortunately recalls a tall, foul-mouthed version of Matt Damon, the film’s producer.