Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is Hollywood's latest attempt to make a commercially successful movie off of the Iraq War and America's involvement in Afghanistan.  They've been trying for almost a decade now, and save for Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, all of them have been failures at the box office.  Many have been helmed by acclaimed directors like Sam Mendes or Robert Redford, some have been praised by critics, and one even went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker).  But no matter the talent or the acclaim they may get, audiences seem to stay home, save the exception I've already mentioned.

Will Ang Lee's adaptation of Ben Fountain's 2012 novel change the tide?  I honestly doubt it.  This is a dramatically inert film that completely misses the satire of the original source, and instead turns into a lengthy slog with characters that just cannot grab our attention.  The story is a simple one.  Set in 2004, a squadron is caught in a firefight in Iraq, and become a media sensation after a Youtube video displays the heroic actions of one of the soldiers, Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn).  The soldiers are immediately sent back to the U.S. for a two week publicity tour, culminating with an appearance at a Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day, where they will participate in a halftime show performance with Destiny's Child. (And no, Beyonce is not in the movie.  All we get to see is the back of the head of a lookalike the entire time.)  Both the book and the movie look at the confusion these soldiers feel about being honored for the worst day in their lives, and how the overblown halftime show (complete with fireworks and smoke machine effects) is just as terrifying to them as a frenzied battle in the Middle East.

The movie covers a 24 hour period for the soldiers, as Billy grapples with a few personal questions of his own.  Should he take the advice of his sister (Kristen Stewart), and just run off at the end of the halftime show, abandoning his troops and thereby avoiding reemployment to Iraq?  Will the brief fling he shares with a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader backstage lead to a real relationship?  Will the fast-talking Hollywood agent (Chris Tucker) who constantly follows the soldiers around be able to make them a movie deal about their story?  Does the owner of the Cowboys, Norman Oglesby (Steve Martin, constantly grappling with a Texas accent that routinely comes and goes at random), really have the best interest in mind in inviting Billy and his squadron to the game?  The real question you will ask yourself should you watch this is why should you even care, as this is one of the curiously calm and unfulfilling movies about war ever made.

The big deal behind Billy Lynn is not the story it's telling, but rather the way it's been filmed.  The movie has been shot at 120 frames per second (five times the usual rate of the movie), with crystal clear images that can't even be muted by those clumsy and dark 3D glasses.  It's certainly an impressive feat, and I look forward to when a filmmaker tries this approach again with a story that is actually worth telling.  Here, Ang Lee gives us the clearest movie images I've ever seen, but forgets to give us something to care about.  The flow of the movie is overly rehearsed.  When the soldiers are supposed to be having lively and spontaneous conversations with each other in the back of a stretched limo, it's way too precise and calculated to come across as just a random conversation.  Even the press conference that the soldiers attend seems eerily quiet, staged, and lacks the energy and the spontaneity that it would have.  There is just this strange lifelessness to the entire film, even when we are watching the soldiers in an intense firefight. 

Everything is just so detached and unemotional, you start to wonder if maybe Lee is trying to make some kind of artistic statement, or maybe trying to put us into the mindset of his main character, who is clearly detached from everything going on around him, because he is constantly haunted by the memories of the battle, and of losing his friend in the war (portrayed by Vin Diesel in a few ineffective flashback scenes).  Billy himself never engages us as a character, and simply comes across as a clean-shaven kid with a dead-eyed stare.  The original novel took a hard look at America's desire to add corporate sponsorship to our soldiers coming home, and while the movie does retain that element to some degree, it doesn't do it with the same level of humor and satire.  This is a joyless film that quickly becomes a chore to watch, because there's just no feeling to it.

Lee seems to not want to offend anyone with his movie, and that's the wrong approach to take.  He doesn't want to poke fun, and he also doesn't want to really explore what's going on in the mind of the soldiers at the center of the film.  He just wants to show off what he can do with this new film technology.  It's certainly an impressive feat in that regard, but when you consider how cold and isolated the film itself feels, you have to just hope that someone will use this technology again and in a more effective way as quickly as possible.

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