While the summer movie season is in full effect, it is never to early to look at the upcoming Oscar Season. The New York Film Festival took a step in pointing out a potential player in the Oscar race with todays announcement. Director of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s next film, Last Flag Flying has been selected to open the 55th New York Film Festival which is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The film stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne as a trio of Vietnam veterans who are mourning the loss of Carell’s character’s son in the early days of the Iraq War.
In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraqi Invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers.
NYFF director and selection chair describes the film as “infectiously funny, quietly shattering, celebratory, mournful, meditative, intimate, expansive, vastly entertaining, and all-American in the very best sense,” so in other words, a great Richard Linklater movie. This is one that I found a curious choice of material for Linklter in the wake of Boyhood and his sorely underseen gem Everybody Wants Some!!, but reading this description and the praise by Jones, it’s starting to make sense—this is less a buddy road comedy than a meditation on post-9/11 America.
This may be the start of what could be another crazy Oscar season.
