‘Flag Day’: Sean Penn’s Family Drama Is A Fine Showcase For Dylan Penn, But Otherwise Plays It Safe [Cannes Review]

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016. Starring the director’s own daughter Dylan Penn in the principal role, the film adapts Jennifer Vogel’s 2005 memoir, “Flim-Flam Man,” about the writer’s turbulent relationship with her father, John Vogel his many get-rich-quick schemes, and the lasting effects on their family.

“Flag Day” is a fine showcase of Dylan Penn’s acting abilities, as Jennifer metamorphoses from the ingenuous young adult who idolizes her father to the battle-weary investigative journalist who knows better. The Penn father-daughter duo undoubtedly brings an air of authenticity to the Vogels’ relationship, which is wonderful at its best and tragic at its worst. Yet the film as a whole is somewhat of a mixed bag: both a paean for a lost America and an indictment of a modern American reality, at times feeling like an extended music video for the mismatched garble of Chopin preludes and rock anthems courtesy of Eddie Vedder. And in keeping with music videos, the film often falls into predictable choices and hackneyed character tropes: the alcoholic mother, the absentee unreliable father, the angelic younger brother. If the film works, it does so in unrisky, unsurprising ways. (There’s even a steering-wheel-acting scene, in the artistic stylings of Chloe Fineman). And if it ever shows us something new, it only does so fleetingly, before retreating into banality.

Jennifer Vogel (Dylan Penn) is a child of the ’70s: the era of laissez-faire parenting, summer barbecues captured on Super 8 video cameras, and 11-year-olds just, uh, driving cars alone at night. The film’s opening sequence reveals that her father, John (Sean Penn), has been caught up in scams and cons since her early childhood—borrowing money he can’t pay back and buying property on a payment plan he never intends to fulfill. But his delinquency doesn’t dissuade young Jennifer from revering her father from a young age. If the “special moments of childhood are like fairy tales,” then Jennifer’s father “was like a prince”: the fun-loving, charismatic leader who kept her young childhood full of excitement and adventure. But when he leaves town, evading yet another debt, Jennifer and her younger brother Nick are left with their alcoholic mother, Patty (Katheryn Winnick, who mysteriously never seems to age over decades-long gaps).

As she ages into adolescence and early adulthood, Jennifer begins to unwittingly imitate her father, indulging herself in recreational drugs, a punk-rock aesthetic, and a casual arson habit. But when a traumatic incident drives her away from her mother’s home, she finds herself wayfaring back to her father, whom she takes on as a fixer-upper, attempting to lead him back to the straight and narrow. She fails, of course—despite what he says, John can never really change his ways—but at least it inspires her to change her own life, enrolling at the University of Minnesota with the hopes of becoming an investigative journalist.

The more Jennifer succeeds, it seems, the more John burrows himself deeper into his illicit habits, running one con after another until the law finally catches up to him. The relationship has a frustrating circuitousness, which feels authentic yet vexing to watch. John continues to commit crimes and ask for forgiveness, while Jennifer continues to turn him down. The meatier emotional explanations are done mostly through monotonous voiceovers by Dylan Penn, which feel like excerpts from the audiobook of a middling novel, read by a bored narrator. And though John continues to disappoint his daughter, the film shows a clear preference for him as a parent to Jennifer’s mother, who is either dysfunctionally drunk or boringly functional, but in both cases less dimensional than her father. John’s instability makes him glamorous, exciting, adventurous; Patty’s makes her inadequate, uncaring, inconsequential. Maybe this double standard is Jennifer’s not the film’s—after all, who among us has a clear and unbiased view of our parents—but it rings rather conventional all the same.

There’s also the fact that John’s crimes are technically illegal but also not completely amoral. Of course, stealing and counterfeiting money is wrong, and like Jennifer, anybody would want their father to come about money in an honest, job-seeking way. But the fact remains that in the moral balance of “Flag Day,” John’s criminal acts do not dissuade Jennifer from loving her father; even in his last moments, he remains something of a martyred hero. It feels very American that someone who breaks the law can be an outlaw, not a criminal, an adventure-seeker, not a reprobate. And yet, that someone would need to resort to these measures also feels like the demise of the American Dream. [B-]

Follow along with our complete coverage from the 2021 Cannes Film Festival here.