Siraj Syed reviews Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk by Ang Lee

>“Americans are children, who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.”

> “How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.”

>“It is sort of weird, being honored for the worst day of your life.”

Trust Ang Lee to map all three ‘worlds’ through the psyche of a first world (read American) soldier, an unpleasant past, a dreamy world of decoration, desert and death, and the option of bailing out, having done his bit fantastically well. While taking a prismatic view, he went on to landscape the tale on three planes: personal, familial and national. Even though there is a sense of déjà vu in the Iraq war setting and the American obsession with hero-worship, the film deserves a recce, if not a second encounter.

Nineteen-year-old private Billy Lynn along with his fellow Specialist soldiers in Bravo Squad, Iraq, becomes a hero, after a harrowing fire-fight, in which he valiantly combats the enemy, while trying to save the life of a fellow Bravoman. The incident is filmed by an embedded newsperson. When the footage is shown back home, in Texas, it heralds a new hero. Lynn and the Bravos are brought home, for a victory tour.

Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular half-time show of the Thanksgiving Day football game, what really happened to the squad is revealed—the squad barely survived and their brother-in-arms died, as did one attacker, whose neck was slit by Lynn. Nevertheless, he is arrogantly reminded of the Alamo and the Americans winning over the Mexicans, by a patronising, gold-digging Texan. Not true, retorts Lynn, “The Mexicans massacred the Texans.”

He is then made to appreciate that the battle he fought is not his property anymore, and that the proposed film rights will bring in only $5,500 apiece. Earlier, they were offered $100,000/person, when Hillary Swank first evinced interest in reprising Lynn’s role. They have a manager and a film agent, are warmly applauded for their service and also callously exploited, fodder for a 'crackers and fire-works, song and dance' spectacle that collapses the difference between patriotic sentiment and crass commercialism.

There are three weighty reasons for Lynn to stay home and not head back to the battle-ground: the trauma his family is going through, the cheer leader/social-worker girl to whom he lost his virginity the day before, and his disillusionment with civilians, who aim to first further their design through the army and then do not hesitate to milk their achievements. Not many 19 year-olds would have to go through this trilemma.

Booksite Amazon sums up Ben Fountain’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist in 2012. “From the, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, comes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (‘The Catch-22 of the Iraq War’ —Karl Marlantes).”

A Catch-22 (a cult novel that addresses the cyclic question: would you rather remain brave and normal, and fight at the front, or would you buckle under trauma, and seek exception from combat duty, under mental illness grounds?) it is, with shades of Hurt Locker and American Sniper. Jean-Christophe Castelli, long-term associate of Lee and executive producer of Life of Pi, gets to divide 22/7 here, with so many characters populating the sets/locales and only 110 minutes to play with. It’s an almost contemporary novel that he has adapted, and except for some back story, it is said that a lot of the chapters do make it to screen. Profundities, alternating with sardonic smiles, mark the dialogue right through, and we’ll go with Fountain’s wordsmanship. Some picks are tagged below.

Interestingly, the very man in Brave Squad who talks about omni-present Lord Krishna (“not in my part of Texas,” insists Billy) and has a Ganesha idol around, dies a brutal death. The others are a random bunch of black/Hispanic/Filipino and more privates. The movie agent is black. Billy’s girl asks him whether he is a Christian. In Iraq, they are, obviously, fighting Muslims.

While the football interlude becomes the centrepiece, the game itself is of less importance, compared to the games that the money-bags are playing off-field. Pivoted around the gun (and later knife) battle, the ammunition engagement scenes fail to ignite any real feelings. Action is competently classy, but the communication is drowned in the noise, and you keep wondering what is going on, and why for so long. Likewise, the recurring run-ins with the security and ground staff at the stadium drag into tedium.

Ang Lee (Taiwanese; Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi) gave us a below expectations Life of Pi. It’s almost the same here, perhaps marginally improved. His fascination for the printed word and his fixation with flashback technique is apparent. Some of the reverse angle cuts, the present to past to present swivel flash-backs, the subtle sex scene that begins with a dolly tracking shot showing the cheerleader’s plastic pom left on a table and moves into the bedroom, and the almost silent life and death struggle between Billy and the Taliban adversary, culminating a slow spread of blood on the ground below, are vintage Lee.

His indictment of political and material demons, who will resort to war and every other unscrupulous means in pursuit of filthy lucre, does away with subtlety. The many references to songs of a decade ago and the clever picturisation of scenes 'featuring' Destiny’s Child (Black Texan singer-actress Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter was then part of the four-girl R&B group) is ...well, clever. Casting is commendable. Maybe the film ‘Walks’ in a decade too late, and is unable to distance itself very much from the spate of ‘Valiant American soldiers who fought in the Iraqi war, and their traumatic memoirs’ one point of view genre that is, hopefully, on its last legs now. Ang Lee is capable of more. Much more.

Joe Alwyn was cast in the main role just two days after he left his drama school, London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He has an amazingly vulnerable baby-face that carries its war-hardened body seamlessly. And those eyes! Kirsten Stewart (Panic Room, Twilight Saga, Snow-White and the Huntsman, Clouds of Sils Maria, Certain Women) as his sister tugs at your heart strings in a role length that keeps her part curiously interesting. Also interesting is the choice of Vin Diesel (turning 50; Saving Private Ryan, Fast And Furious, The Last Witch-Hunter) as the man who mouths Hindu philosophy, the Bravo elder statesman who gets fatally hit. Diesel is not the killing machine here; on the contrary, he gets killed. Using a glance that goes askew to good advantage, comic star Steve Martin (Father of the Bride, The Pink Panther, It’s Complicated) as the football team-owner reminds you that he is versatile, not cramped by style.

Makenzie Leigh (first major film role) as the cheerleader has a waist to covet and legs to match, Chris Tucker (Rush Hour, The Fifth Element, Jackie Brown) walks through a stereo-typical role which has been intentionally so delineated and Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy, Unbroken, Pan) fits in the Bravo Squad chief like a glove.

High-grade clarity of the digital cinematography by John Toll allows us to read the layers of facial muscles in a rarely seen before insight. It was too much to expect 120 frames per second detailing of image data in the NFDC auditorium in Worli, Mumbai, and, as I read a little after the show, only a handful of cinemas across the globe are technically equipped to project at that speed.

So, don’t even think about it.

See the film.

Treat it like a long, brisk, eventful walk across the societal-cultural-angst ridden landscape of America, 2004. Only walk, don’t run.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEG2uamc324

Rating: ***

Excerpt from the New York Times review, published yesterday

“The movie is being released in two forms: a 3-D, super-high-definition version with an accelerated frame rate in a couple of theaters and a more conventional version everywhere else. The souped-up edition, which was screened at the New York Film Festival, is a fascinating failed experiment, an attempt to bring Billy’s drama to life with unprecedented immediacy that falls into an uncanny valley between cinema and virtual reality. The images are, somewhat paradoxically, so hyper-real that their artificiality becomes more pronounced; you feel as if you’re sitting uncomfortably close to the costumed holograms of famous actors.”

(Only six theatres in the world are equipped to screen such high resolution and frame rate, of which two are in the USA: one in New York City's AMC Lincoln Square, where the film had its world première, and the other in Los Angeles' The ArcLight Hollywood).

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk quotes/Dialogue from the book/film

“Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall, with a country attached.”

> “If you could figure out how to live with family, then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.”

> “Okay, so maybe they aren't the greatest generation by anyone's standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.”

>“It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.”

> “There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.”

 >“Everybody supports the troops," Dime woofs, "support the troops, support the troops, hell yeah we're so fucking PROUD of our troops, but when it comes to actual money? Like somebody might have to come out of pocket for the troops? Then all the sudden we're on everybody's tight-ass budget. Talk is cheap, I got that, but gimme a break. Talk is cheap but money screams, this is our country, guys. And I fear for it. I think we should all fear for it.”

>“He'd say "I love you" to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone's soul.”

>“What to call it - the spark of God? Survival instinct? The souped-up computer of an apex brain evolved from eons in the R&D of natural selection? You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person - Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month-old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and gruesome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that - there’s real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all.”

> “Even harder was describing his sense that Shroom’s death might have ruined him for anything else, because when he died? When I felt his soul pass through me? I loved him so much right then, I don’t think I can ever have that kind of love for anybody again. So what was the point of getting married, having kids, raising a family if you knew you couldn’t give them your very best love?”

>“He decides he wants both, more or less. He’d like to hang with Beyoncé in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile f*** each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning.”

>“[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants (Saddam Hussain). A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country's health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world's most expensive armies while he allowed his nation's infrastructure to crumble. Who channelled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country's wealth for their own personal gain.”

> “Maybe the light's at the other end of the tunnel.”

>“It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted to do was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. All the big war-mongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I'd be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with 'em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring it on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.”

>Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas.

>"You see where I'm going with this?'

"Well, yeah."

"I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.”