Sean Penn’s Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces melodramatically shouting at each other. The film would verge on high camp if it weren’t so assured of its own significance, what with all the talk about the titular day of commemoration, as some kind of American parable. From Eddie Vedder warbling on the soundtrack, to the wannabe-Badlands voiceover, to the grainy, washed-out images signifying that the story takes place in the past, every element in the film is given to overstatement.
There’s scant momentum to Flag Day’s telling of the real-life story of Jennifer Vogel (played by Dylan Penn as an adult, Jadyn Rylee as a tween, and Addison Tymec as a child), whose life centers around her father, counterfeiter, bank robber, and arsonist John Vogel (Sean Penn). Escaping to wherever he’s set up shop whenever her mother’s (Katheryn Winnick) alcoholism gets too bad, Julie feels a strong bond with her less than trustworthy father.
Based on Jennifer Vogel’s 2004 memoir Flim-Flam Man: A True Family History, this is a film that goes about illustrating that the narcissistic John has redeemable dimensions by endowing him with a love of classical music—specifically, and seemingly exclusively, Frédéric Chopin. In one of the film’s most self-pleased scenes, John’s girlfriend (Bailey Noble) introduces Jennifer and her younger brother to Bob Seger, setting off a debate over why they prefer his music to Chopin’s. Throughout, the composer’s name is repeatedly dropped by John with all the grace of an undergrad who wants everyone to know they’re listening to old piano music now.
The sense one gets in this moment isn’t that this incessant name-dropping reflects the amateurishness of John’s interest, but the screenplay’s own lazy sense of characterization. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jennifer’s narration, which is as overwritten as the dialogue is flavorless. Striking out on her own after an attempt at living with her father falls through, she muses via voiceover, “Now my abiding concern was what I would become, and whether I myself wanted to matter at all.” Between its purple prose and impossibly shallow and repetitive action, Flag Day fails to create any resonance of theme or character.
Trying to build a symbiotic father-daughter life together after Jennifer flees to her mother again, the pair seem to repeatedly have the same conversation about John’s moral turpitude. These tearful scenes take the place of any kind of specificity to the characters and how their actions affect one other that we might have found outside of the living rooms and patios where they have these confrontations. Most scenes in Flag Day that aren’t an all-out yelling match are just hammy montages of a vaguely stereotyped, down-home Midwestern life.
In the many scenes featuring John and his daughter, the younger Penn is at a distinct disadvantage: While her Oscar-winning father has the profound ability to imbue a roughly sketched character with an authentic sense of life, Dylan Penn proves unable to help a dead script out in the same way. Perhaps the imbalance in these scenes is the key to the whole project. Flag Day appears to be filtered through the eyes of a young woman coming to know herself, but in actuality is centered around her comparatively charismatic scamp of a father, just as the scenes themselves all end up being carried by Sean Penn. Rarely has “vanity project” seemed a better descriptor than it does for this at once kitschy and pretentious film.
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