Direction: Sean Penn
Country: USA
Melodramatic and threadbare, Flag Day is another calamitous misstep (following the unbearable The Last Face) from actor/director Sean Penn, who stars here alongside his daughter Dylan. He follows a script by the brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (they also wrote Fair Game, Edge of Tomorrow and Ford vs. Ferrari), which was based on Jennifer Vogel’s 2005 book Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life.
The classical music of Chopin accompanies Jennifer (Dylan)’s recollections of her childhood - brought up with a mix of sadness and nostalgia by the dreamy, Malick-like cinematography of Daniel Moder - but not even when Bob Seger’s "Night Moves" aims for happier times, we get the film to get better. The narrative gets inescapably trapped in the dramatic circles of the family that Jennifer’s obsession with the secret life of her criminal father (Sean), becomes indifferent, torpid and unsurprising.
The disappointing reconstruction of this erratic father-daughter relationship is crammed with depressing tones, miserable supplication and vain attempts to reach the viewers’ emotions. In fact, the breakdown scenes border the embarrassing, and if Sean gets away with his natural acting instincts, Dylan never impresses in her insincere wails.
Therefore, there’s not much here to cling on to, and maybe Sean, who did some lovely work behind the camera in the past - The Pledge (2001) and Into the Wild (2007) are good examples - should really think about directorial retirement.
