{"id":24881,"date":"2021-08-24T12:27:40","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T12:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shows4.com\/?p=24881"},"modified":"2021-08-24T12:27:40","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T12:27:40","slug":"flag-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shows4.com\/?p=24881","title":{"rendered":"Flag Day"},"content":{"rendered":"


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It\u2019s suffused with what you might call the Penn Darkness Factor. \u201cFlag Day\u201d tells the story of the richly troubled, twisted, and touching relationship between a father, John Vogel, played by Penn as one of the most scurrilous dads in the history of movies, and his daughter, Jennifer, played by Penn\u2019s own daughter, Dylan Penn, who gives a fantastic performance. Early on, there\u2019s a scene set in 1975, when Jennifer is 11 years old (she\u2019s played in this scene by Jadyn Rylee), and John is driving the two of them somewhere on an empty road at night. He places the girl on his lap in the driver\u2019s seat, and we think he\u2019s playfully showing her, for a few seconds, what it\u2019s like to drive. But then he basically says: I\u2019m going to sleep \u2014 you drive for the next hour. What he\u2019s doing is so wrong it\u2019s funny, but years ago I don\u2019t think Penn would have staged a scene of this much dysfunction with this much levity.<\/p>\n

John and his alcoholic wife, Patty (Katheryn Winnick), have a fractious household that is barely a home; for most of the movie they\u2019re living apart, on separate islands of messiness. \u201cFlag Day\u201d is based on Jennifer Vogel\u2019s 2004 memoir \u201cFlim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father\u2019s Counterfeit Life,\u201d and it\u2019s about what it\u2019s like to grow up with a father who is such a sneaky, flaky deadbeat liar that you never know which way is up. John is a petty criminal and self-styled \u201centrepreneur\u201d who lives inside his delusions of grandeur. (He was born on Flag Day and thinks the holiday is about him.) He always has a dozen plans going, but none of them ever seem to come to fruition. He owes money to everyone (including some scary bikers), and when he\u2019s trying to do something as basic as preside over a family cookout, the flame on the barbecue is too high, he turns the marinating of pepper steak into a way to bully Jennifer\u2019s kid brother, and he\u2019s fixated on playing classical music, as if this were going to infuse his children with class.<\/p>\n

Penn, sporting numerous variations on sleazy facial hair, makes John a tin-pot domestic narcissist who somehow believes, at every moment, that he\u2019s doing the right thing. When he talks about some scheme he\u2019s about to cash in on, the main person he\u2019s conning is himself. Yet John, for all his skullduggery, has a broken, vibrant warmth about him. He\u2019s got a scraggly love for his kids (the brother is played by Penn\u2019s son, Hopper Jack Penn), even if he can\u2019t bring himself to act it out by getting his act together. Penn, as a filmmaker, shows a bone-deep understanding of the kind of parent whose dramatic bad behavior can itself be a perverse beacon for his children. It\u2019s not that the behavior is defensible; it\u2019s deplorable. Yet John pours so much of who he is into his disheveled carny-barker effrontery that if you\u2019re his child, it\u2019s almost impossible not to have a certain kinship with that side of him. That\u2019s what he\u2019s giving you to hold onto.<\/p>\n

\u201cFlag Day,\u201d set mostly in Minnesota, sprawls over the period from 1975 to 1992, and part of what\u2019s compelling about it is that Penn has become an indelibly fluid craftsman who uses the leaps in time to infuse a story of devastation with lightness and curiosity. Even telling the story of this scarred, flawed, barely together family, Penn creates honest notes of nostalgia, as in his use of Bob Seger\u2019s \u201cNight Moves,\u201d or in the primal scene where Jennifer, on the side of the road, draws a sketch of Happy Highway Harry, one of those tall waving commercial statues of roadside Americana. That image stands in for Jennifer\u2019s fleeting dream of having a serene, contented, protected existence.<\/p>\n

That, however, is not the life that fate handed her. In 1981, she\u2019s a 17-year-old high-school hellion in goth black hair, snorting drugs and acting out, and this is where Dylan Penn\u2019s performance begins to announce its power. Up until then, Jennifer has struck us as a sweet and rather pensive girl, but Penn colors her in with jarring shades of grief, contempt, and scalded fury. Even here, though, she never lets us lose sight of the bruised humanity within. Jennifer has moved in with her mother, but after Patty\u2019s creep boyfriend (Norbert Leo Butz) sexually assaults her (an event that Patty turns a blind eye to), she has little choice but to move back in with her father.<\/p>\n

For a while, \u201cFlag Day\u201d becomes almost a distorted parody of a feel-good Hollywood father-daughter buddy movie. John keeps coming up with schemes and inventions (his latest: a jean stretcher!), but then, out of devotion to his daughter, he vows to leave the b.s. behind and get a straight job. He puts on a suit and tie and walks around with an important-looking briefcase, handing out his resume. Penn, going back to the ethos of films like \u201cStraight Time\u201d and \u201cThe King of Comedy,\u201d loves playing unbeautiful losers like this. It\u2019s part of his empathy, but he also flaunts the flamboyant theater of it \u2014 it\u2019s almost like a rite of exorcism for him, as if Penn were playing the scurrilous men that he fears, on some level, he could have been. We think: Maybe John is getting his act together. But John is fooling us the same way he fools everyone. And once Jennifer has his number, she\u2019s done. So, it appears, is he. Badly executed armed robbery, complete with Beatle wig, isn\u2019t a scam you can talk your way out of.<\/p>\n

\u201cFlag Day\u201d is Jennifer\u2019s story, and in the last part of the movie she comes into her own, pulling herself together enough to study journalism. She winds up working for the Minneapolis alternative weekly City Pages, and she\u2019s going great guns \u2014 until the day that she looks out through the paper\u2019s glass doors and there, in the street, stands John. The way that shot is staged, it\u2019s a brilliant moment of filmmaking. Penn now looks frighteningly lean, with a modified prison haircut, but he\u2019s also got a new monied glow. And what Dylan Penn\u2019s face shows us is the underlying tangle of emotion Jennifer is feeling: the love, the heartbreak, but also the sickening distress. The fact that her father has just shown up like a stalker is itself a red flag. She can now see right through him. Yet this scoundrel father, who she has systematically learned not to trust, is the only father she has. That\u2019s the story \u201cFlag Day\u201d tells, and it\u2019s the reason the movie hits such a universal nerve. We\u2019ve already had a flash forward to what will happen to John. The wrenching pain of it is that he\u2019s a counterfeit father who\u2019s also the real deal.<\/p><\/div>\n

Genres:<\/strong>Drama, Trailer<\/div>\n
Director:<\/strong>Sean Penn<\/div>\n
Cast:<\/strong>Mitchell Nguyen-McCormickTom, Anniko, Dylan Penn<\/div>\n
Videos<\/strong><\/div>\n