Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk: too long a walk

Cast: Joe Alwyn, Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, Vin Diesel, Steve Martin, Makenzie Leigh

Rated: 4/10

War hero Billy Lynn, a callow looking chocolate faced marine with pink lips and watery blue eyes, and his Bravo Squad take a victory walk in Texas much before the Iraq War is over. In that sense, the serenading is pre-mature with the war being far from over and re-deployments only a step away from the massively dressed up football stadium waiting to fall over these war heroes.

All the noise, the song and dance (no less than Beyonce) and the rigmarole of interviews, chat shows, press conferences and music shows these war weary youth are put through is ably juxtaposed with the sound of machine guns, grenades and death in Iraq by director Ang Lee to make this uncomfortable film on wartime blues.

For the Indian audience, it is far removed from their world though the Iraq War has impacted all and sundry across the globe. Seen in the American context, the silent psychological problems that fighters go through, sometimes succumbing on the shrink’s couch, sometimes braving it all to return to fight another day, has been showcased subtly but starkly. The sound of swishing fireworks, for example, makes the marines run for cover. It’s like gunfire for them. Billy Lynn, the leading hero, has problems galore, what with losing his friend and commander in an attack by Iraqi rebels. Now that the video clip of him running out midfire in a bid to save his leader has gone viral, he has become an unlikely star. Altogether another reason that he emerges in the film’s opening shot in a haze of alcohol and bed romps, as if heroism is licence for debauchery.

But it is the under-current of emotional issues that Lee taps with acumen that make this movie a not-so boring affair. Encased through the goings-on with Billy who secretly longs for a life in peace with a girlfriend, a family and a civilian surrounding away from war zone and yet talks of returning to the warfront, the film holds on, much like life in the zone of death. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 13 November, 2016