Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s new Iraq War film “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” which arrived for its world premiere in Manhattan Friday night, was billed as a cinematic breakthrough, a technological marvel that would bring us sharper and more lifelike images than we have ever seen on a movie screen before. That promise turned out to be absolutely, and disastrously, correct.
It turns out that “lifelike” is exactly what you don’t want in a movie: Movies are supposed to look better than life, which is one of the things that’s transporting and transformative about them.
“Billy Lynn,” the story of an Iraq War hero’s day spent at a Dallas football stadium in preparation for a halftime show, in which he and the rest of his infantry squad will serve as glorified props standing at attention behind a gyrating Destiny’s Child performance, was shot in an unprecedented way. Lee, who won Oscars for directing “Life of Pi” and “Brokeback Mountain,” shot the film not only in 3-D but also in ultrahigh-definition 4K, which he said Friday night delivered eight times more detail than an ordinary film, and also at the rate of 120 frames per second. Film is ordinarily shot and projected at 24 frames per second, so that means “Billy Lynn” packs in five times as many images as an ordinary film.
So that’s how a film can be made in 2016. The question is: Is that how a film should be made in 2016?
The answer is a resounding no. The images are so startlingly like life that it’s as if the actors are appearing onstage before you. It took me several minutes even to register what the characters were saying because I was so distracted by the look. It’s a weirdly disorienting experience, and not at all a pleasing one.
Moreover, the sterling quality of the images creates a paradox: Because the presentation is so ultra-real, it somehow becomes ultra-phony to experience. “Billy Lynn” is a technical sensation with a $40 million budget that puts you in mind of a homemade commercial from your local Buick dealer. Reality just isn’t all that pretty, and this movie isn’t an idealized version of reality but the closest we’ve ever come to how ordinary existence looks.
The definition is so sharp, Lee told journalists Friday morning, that he couldn’t put stage makeup on the actors (as opposed to ordinary makeup worn by women) because the cameras would have picked up the artifice. But here’s the thing: Even as handsome a young fellow as Joe Alwyn, the British performer just out of drama school who plays Specialist Billy Lynn, has a face that’s so marked by moles and blemishes that it doesn’t hold up well when blown up to 30 or 50 times its actual size. How many actors’ faces could survive that? OK, here’s one: Kristen Stewart, who plays Billy’s sister and looks great.
Moreover, despite the expertise of director of photography John Toll, the Oscar-winning cinematographer who shot “Legends of the Fall” and “Braveheart,” the lighting is flat and lacking in texture, redoubling the everydayness of the images. It’s like looking at a skin flick shot in somebody’s basement: Everything is stripped of all mystery. Nor are the actors aided by the hyper-reality: Everyone comes across as stilted and stagey, even such a wily veteran as Steve Martin, who plays the owner of the Dallas football team whose Thanksgiving Day game provides the backdrop for the halftime show, in which Billy and his friends appear. Every time someone opens his mouth, the lines seem as wooden as daytime television. (Alwyn fares the best because he has very little to say throughout.)
The technology Lee uses is so new that only one theater in New York City (the Lincoln Square) and one in Los Angeles are equipped to show this film in all its glory, although other theaters will be able to partially take advantage of Lee’s vision and show the film at a higher definition than usual (for instance at 48 or 60 frames per second). I imagine the film’s look could only be improved by being shown in a less-than-state-of-the-art theater. Nobody goes to movies to be slapped in the face with straight-up reality any more than anyone shows up at a restaurant to be presented with a paper plate, a spork, a can of Dinty Moore and a can opener.