Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Synopsis: 19-year-old Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) comes home with his squad for a promotional tour after he becomes a media celebrity and is shaken by the contrast between his 15 minutes of fame and the realities of war.

To say the least Ang Lee’s latest film is a strange beast. Not in terms of its subject matter but rather its raison d’être. Although it is to be shown in Australia (indeed most places around the world) in 2D due to lack of appropriate projection facilities it was filmed in 3D at 120 frames per second (the normal rate is 24fps) using techniques developed by Douglas Trumbull (who was responsible for the pioneering sfx photography for 2001).  Whilst the result is a remarkable visual clarity and depth of field, there is, bar one section of the film which I will come to later, no apparent reason for this technological grand-standing as the bulk of the material is visually mundane. 

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is set in 2003 at the time of the American invasion of Iraq.  Given the considerable number of films dealing with this subject matter, Saddam Hussein and the existence or otherwise of WMDs are largely past use-by-date topics and with no injection of new material or difference of viewpoint there is a sense of been there, done that.  This is so particularly as the film’s main theme, the psychological divide between normal mainstream American life and the experience of war in the Middle East has already been dealt with by films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and Brothers (2009), itself a remake of  Susanne Bier's 2004 Brothers, and Lee’s film adds nothing to this much-better realized material.  Had it been released in the naughties it might have taken its place in the second tier behind those films but as it is, it comes across as re-heated left-overs.

Bar the engagement in Iraq which is the event which turned Billy Lynn into a hero and to which the film flashes back intermittently, the plot is largely given over the lads’  tour, devised to pump up support for Bush’s invasion, and culminating in an appearance during the half-time entertainment for a Thanksgiving Day football game in Billy’s home state, Texas. This brings to a boil the the film’s core concern and it is a magnificently staged sequence, the contrast between the grotesque excess of American consumerist society and the dehumanizing brutality of the Middle East invasion, brought home with brilliant showmanship.  

But then there’s the close-ups of Vin Diesel’s heroically-deceased sergeant, "Shroom", and Steve Martin pulling his signature facial expressions (on the other hand baby-faced Joe Alwyn is almost too well-suited to Lee’s penchant for to-camera close-ups), while in a sub-plot Chris Tucker’s agent spends most of his time on the phone trying to get the boys a sweet movie deal with Hilary Swank playing Billy (but not directed by Ang Lee).  All of these meta-narrative cross-references take one out of what little involvement there is to be had from Billy’s story.  If these elements are questionable, the film’s ending, in which in imagination Billy climbs into a troop carrier for a mystical, moral-of-the-story duologue with the resurrected Sergeant Shroom and then morphs into some comradely borderline homo-erotic bonding (a theme already referenced in an earlier scene) in a stretch Hummer, makes one wonder if Lee has not completely lost his touch.

With his 2012 hit, Life Of Pi, Lee successfully demonstrated the place of advanced technology in film-making.   With Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk the same cannot be said and given the production budget of $40 million and counting someone at Sony, the studio which bankrolled the film, is going to find themselves cleaning toilets. Lee’s reputation is such that he no doubt will withstand the ordure but I’ll bet he won’t be trying anything like this again soon.  Oh, and Kristen Stewart fans, she’s only on screen for a few minutes and even then, doesn’t get a lot to do with them.

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