The Glorious Non-Complexity of Flyboys

Apologies for my long absence, and I'll open with a bit of a confession: among my menagerie of nerdy obsessions, one of the strangest is a decades-long fixation I've had with the First World War. In particular, I've always been fascinated by the beginnings of air warfare during that period. I was one of those really popular 10-year-olds who could tell you the differences between a Spad and an SE-5a, and back it up with action. Thus, when I saw the preview for Flyboys this summer, I knew that no matter how awful the reviews, I had to dust off the old nerd flag and let 'er fly, you should pardon the expression.

And the reviews were in fact almost universally dreadful. I think the approval on rottentomatoes.com (http://rottentomatoes.com/m/flyboys/) was hovering around a Bush-like 30%. So it was with lowered expectations, a pathological hatred of CGI overkill and an inexplicable fondness for the screen work of James Franco (who, to paraphrase Camus, is the only James Dean we deserve) that I caught the film last week at the local 'plex. I've noted elsewhere in these pages that sometimes it's OK to switch off the old complex-ometer and enjoy what my Dad still calls popcorn movies. This I was able to do, and I am not trying to be contrarian when I say that I loved every minute of this wonderfully corny, predictable, unabashedly traditional film.

Regular readers know that I am a lover of complexity in film, and from Godard to Gondry, I am a huge fan of "meta" film, mobius-strip plots, multiple layers of meaning and all that pomo jazz. In a sense, that's what made Flyboys such a treat; it is a film without a single ironic wink. It feels like a great, golden-era Hollywood film by Howard Hawks, or at least by Aldrich or Wellman. The performances, led by the still-underrated Franco, are uniformly fine; the romantic subplot is pleasantly underplayed and even lends a surprising touch of melancholy rather than the expected wholesale tragedy to the conclusion of the story. My inner fifth-grader was thrilled by the action in the dogfight sequences. And while these scenes may have lacked the immediacy of Hell's Angels or Wings, the CGI was unobtrusive, for once. It is a simple, old-school plot, where each character signs up for the suicide mission of joining the Escadrille for varied reasons: the rich kid proving himself to dad, the thief on the run, the African-American boxer who wants to repay France for the hospitality he never found at home. In the end, of course, they put aside their differences and fly off together into history and glory.

In looking back at the reviews, many writers protested that the film should have been more explicitly anti-war. As someone who counts Grand Illusion and Paths of Glory among my favorite films, I am nevertheless appalled by the notion that if a film is not anti-war, it must therefore be pro-war. When did we all become so knee-jerk simplistic in our reactions? Can't a film simply use war (even the most horrifyingly pointless one the world has ever known) as a backdrop for stories of honor, heroism and camaraderie? Have we grown so cynical that we must regard any examination of the aforementioned traits with acid irony? Does cheering for our hero to overcome any and all obstacles render us thoughtless, complicit cogs in the hegemonic construct? News flash: we can approve heroism in battle without approving of the battle, just as we can support our troops and despise the war. (Hmmm-back to complexity again). And so, I recommend Flyboys, although it is already gone from theaters and much of its epic sweep will surely be lost on DVD. If Memento and Eternal Sunshine are the kind of films I'd love to make now were I a filmmaker, Flyboys is the film I would have wanted to make when I was a kid painting a second coat of glossy red on my model Fokker triplane.