Flag Day: Con In The Family Features Sean Penn and His Daughter In Cathartic Drama
Adapted by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford vs Ferrari) from journalist Jennifer Vogel’s 2004 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life, it’s a tale of scoundrel dad who leaves a trail of heartache in his wake.
That scheme is familiar enough. What sets Flag Day apart is a sort of boxing match between two really good performances: Sean Penn, a great actor playing a bad actor, the wheedling, backpedaling charlatan John Vogel, who has an excuse for every bad impulse. And Dylan Penn, in her first movie role (and who has the cold, patrician stare of her mother, Robin Wright) as her dad’s terrific foil.
The more dad prevaricates and distracts, the more relentlessly daughter bores in. I have no reason to believe the Penns are playing a version of their own father-daughter relationship here, but they do seem to possess a shortcut to disturbingly credible, intimate anger.
In the opening scene, set on rural roads in 1992, the shadow of a helicopter crosses the ground, where police cars are in a high-speed chase. Before we know the resolution to the chase, we arrive at the police station, where the adult daughter of the culprit is conferring with a sympathetic detective (Regina King) and we know this did not end well.
We learn part of the story. Her father, on probation after a previous jail sentence, had skipped bail while awaiting charges for counterfeiting around $20 million, a perverse version of the self-made millionaire.
Flag Day then unfolds as a series of flashbacks of Jennifer’s life, from the mid-seventies and her early life with her parents and younger brother Nick. (Penn’s adult children Dylan and son Hopper assume the teenaged and adult roles.) Their mother Patty (Canadian actress Katheryn Winnick) is initially part of the fun-dad’s fan club. But when he abandons her with the children and a pile of unpaid bills, she descends into alcoholism and depression.
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Eventually, Patty’s brother (Josh Brolin) steps in, and takes the children to live with their father, who is now with a new younger girlfriend. There’s a line in Jennifer’s voice-over monologue about how she believed her father, with his artistic airs (a fondness for Chopin and expensive cars), was a portal to the bigger, exciting world.
In practice, his sense of adventure plays out with reckless endangerment, such as the time having his 11-year-old child sit on his lap and steer the car on the highway while he naps or blasting dangerously high flames from the barbecue. When a group of bikers show up at the house to claim an unpaid debt, he tells the kids to go play in the house for a while and shows up later with a busted nose.
After a couple of years, when the debt collectors get more threatening, the kids are sent back with their mother again. Jennifer’s in high school, a hard-partying Goth rebel, heading down the same delinquent path as her father.
Her mom Patty’s new boyfriend, a steadily employed alcoholic, Doc (Norbert Leo Butz), climbs into Jen’s bed one night, which Patty pretends was a mistake. Jennifer stuffs a knapsack full of clothes and takes the Greyhound to her father. While she scrambles doing odd jobs, she attempts to create her version of a normal family life.
She helps her father write a new resume, omitting most of the lies. She gives him a haircut and watches him set out each day job-hunting for an executive position, his grifter’s version of the American Dream. The title Flag Day refers to the holiday that’s also John’s birthday, confirming his sense of a grand destiny.
It’s not surprising that critics didn’t embrace the film. Avoidable failure’s a distasteful subject and Flag Day is mostly bitter without the sweet, though there’s some redemption here. Jennifer succeeds in using her father as a counter example of how to live in the world. She becomes an investigative journalist for Minneapolis alternative weekly City Pages, thus exposing other people’s corruption and lies.
For the power of the performances and what they capture about guilt and family manipulation, Flag Day has a cathartic accuracy in many of its scenes.
One day, Jennifer’s father shows up at her newspaper job at a time when she thought he was still in jail. He wants to go to lunch, maybe take a weekend together at cottage he has rented, buy her a fancy convertible and they can be father and daughter again.
For a while she tries to humour him until she catches him in more lies. She finds herself avoiding him and his incessant phone messages, torn between pity and revulsion. What could be crueller than the person who has harmed you wanting to do it all over again?
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Katheryn Winnick.
Flag Day. Directed by Sean Penn. Written by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. Staring Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Katheryn Winnick, Josh Brolin, Norbert Leo Butz, Jadyn Rylee, Hopper Jack Penn, Regina King, and Eddie Marsan. Opens August 27 in theatres in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver and September 3 in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Victoria, Saskatoon, Regina and Halifax.