Dylan Penn

(On Cable TV, September 2022) Money, sex and power are not the only justifications imaginable for reviewers trying to decode why filmmakers attach themselves to a project: Art, ego and social conscience are real possibilities—with awards being a superset of that. So, in deducing what attracted Sean Penn to Flag Day, both as a director and actor, something that may help is knowing that female lead Dylan Penn is Penn’s daughter, and that the film revolves around a complex father/daughter relationship. (Hopper Penn is also on the cast list.) The story, adapted from real-life events, spans decades and describes how a young woman, on her way to becoming a respected journalist, deals with the legacy left by her father, an accomplished con-man with a long list of scams, frauds and arrests. You can certainly see the appeal here in how Flag Day came together, giving Penn père a chance to work with his kids, both as an actor playing their father, and as a director pulling the whole project together. There’s even a frisson of award potential, at least conceptually, in how the film could delve into emotional material heightened by the identities of the actor—historically speaking, not a bad bet during award season. But there’s also a familiarity to the material: a movie-of-the-week collage of clichés that, coupled with the impossible logistics of 62-year-old Penn trying to pass himself off as decades younger, pretty much torpedoes the film’s award potential before the thirty-minute mark. Things improve slightly once everyone plays their age, once daughter and father are on-screen, once we get past the extended throat-clearing of the first act in order to get to the substance of the film. But the damage is done, and Flag Day never recovers from a shaky beginning—in fact, you can even argue that it starts dipping down again with an overdone final act that doesn’t do much. Not every interesting family history has the built-in structure to sustain a movie adaptation, and I presume that the book on which Flag Day is based works better as a biography than the film. A few known names pop up from time to time (the best being Regina King), and Penn can occasionally find a striking visual, but much of Flag Day is too much of a mess to be more than an overwrought family drama. Congratulations to Penn for finding a way to spend more time with his family, I guess, but that doesn’t mean we have to enjoy the result all that much.