Whatever else you might want to say about Flag Day, there’s no denying it’s a personal piece of filmmaking, a large factor in its actor-director’s perennial presence at Cannes. And the biggest source of its appeal and novelty is the fact that blood is thicker than water: Sean Penn has devised a first starring vehicle for his daughter Dylan Penn, casting himself as her errant but vastly loving father to unveil the wild, true saga of American con artist and forger John Vogel. There’s a special cinematic history of these cross-generational family duos: Ryan and Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, Laura Dern and her mother Diane Ladd in numerous films, even Clint and Scott Eastwood––and Penn’s filmmaking is definitely inspired by that former collaborator (alongside Malick). The problem: Flag Day is about a tenth as good as these endeavors.
A piece of would-be American classicism, this is a hackneyed, unevenly written hybrid between a con-man antihero drama and an emotive, heart-bruised coming-of-age film. Like his last, disastrous effort The Last Face, the good intentions are palpable but chased with a real streak of vanity and self-regard. His 2016 Cannes premiere was so dreadful largely because of its almost comically large, global scope; its obvious import to Penn’s activism about African poverty belied a cruel, dehumanizing streak to its supposed targets of empathy. In Flag Day, one can feel him appealing to basics, attempting to remind us of his authentic-folksy storytelling chops. The middle ground between these approaches, deconstructed detective tale The Pledge, remains his most recommendable film as a director.
With Penn’s widest notoriety and most-recognized work coming in the ’80s and ’90s, Flag Day falls in that familiar late-20th-century era of mid-budget, adult-oriented studio dramas it’s aiming to evoke––especially for the age-50-plus post-lockdown audiences it will be marketed to on a theatrical release. Amidst the charmingly bizarre musical curation one can imagine a gravel-toned trailer voiceover artist intoning in the recording booth: “Sean Penn… is [dramatic pause] John Vogel.”
Not far from Will Smith’s attempts to enshrine his son Jaden as his movie-star successor in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, Dylan Penn––playing John’s bright daughter Jennifer––is unlucky to have to carry this film’s credibility on her back. She also has her real-life brother, Jack Hopper Penn, in tow, giving an alarmingly truncated performance perhaps largely ditched in the edit. Although Penn is charismatic as ever, his work as a director evokes a hazy, near-immature grasp of family dynamics. The plot conflict and narrative arc come down to, to be reductive, “daddy issues”: Jennifer is shunted between her alcoholic mother (Kathryn Winnick) and dad (père Penn), failing to fully settle down comfortably with either. Her angsty teen period is denoted by that old staple: the “goth” phase, like John Travolta’s daughter in Face/Off, about as ’90s a film as you can get. Eddie Vedder’s stentorian voice wafts over the soundtrack, and covers R.E.M.’s epochal “Drive” in an ill-fitting lower-key signature. Indeed, Penn’s obsession with legacy ’90s rock acts like Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (whose “Otherside” is used in practically every other scene in The Last Face) continues unabated.
The most interesting, buried element in this work is its theme of mendacity and deception, portrayed through Jennifer’s perception of––and potentially inherited traits––from her father, rather anything we see John Vogel do himself. In a direct contrast, Jennifer becomes a muckraking investigative journalist, the near-anthesis to Jack’s evasion of verifying his actions. Penn’s character is a near-ghost fluttering in the winds of memory, and as he enters the latter part of his career he may become similar for us—so enchanted were we by his work in The Thin Red Line and Carlito’s Way. It’s an achingly sincere film about lifelong, pathological deception, and it can’t mend that contradiction.
Flag Day premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens on August 13.