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Being Flynn has been released on Blu-ray and DVD following a few short theatrical runs. The movie can best be described as a nice try but no cigar. There’s a great idea here, both in the base material from poet Nick Flynn’s memoirs and in the inspired casting of Robert De Niro in one of the lead roles, but it just never pans out past what is visible on the surface. It’s a shame, but it points to the real need for a strong director with this kind of material. The Blu-ray features good picture and sound, and one brief featurette with the usual round of back-patting by everyone.
Studio: Universal/Focus Features/Depth of Field/Corduroy Films/Tribeca
Year: 2012
Length: 1 hr 42 mins
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
BD Resolution and Codec: 1080p, (AVC @ 30 mbps)
Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (@ an average 3.3 mbps, up to 4.4 mbps), Spanish DTS 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish
Film Rating: R (Language, Sexual Content, Drug Use, Brief Nudity, Not in that Order)
Release Date: July 10, 2012
Starring: Robert De Niro, Paul Dano, Olivia Thirlby, Lili Taylor and Julianne Moore, with cameos by Wes Studi and William Sadler
Based on the Memoir by: Nick Flynn
Directed by: Paul Weitz
Film Rating: 2/5
Being Flynn is one of those movies that you wish was better than it is. There’s great potential here, but after a few promising moments early on, it just never pulls itself together. The story, based on poet Nick Flynn’s published memoir, mostly covers the time when a twenty-something Nick worked in a homeless shelter in Boston and in the process wound up meeting his long-gone father for the first time. The story is more complicated than that, as it deals with the issues of being a writer and of trying to find your own identity apart from your parents. This is great material, and as an added bonus, the movie has Robert De Niro giving his all for a role that is thankfully miles away from things like Little Fockers. And yet, it never becomes anything more than some interesting parts that haven’t mixed very well together. I’ll go more into detail in the next paragraph, but for those interested in cutting to the chase, I’ll just say that “there’s no there there” with this movie.
SPOILERS HERE. DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH UNLESS YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN THE MOVIE OR HAVE READ NICK FLYNN’S BOOK. The problem with the movie boils down to the director. Paul Weitz is clearly a fan of the book, and of Flynn’s writing. If he wasn’t, he would not have spent years trying to bring this story to the screen. Unfortunately, this isn’t material on the level of American Pie, Little Fockers or even About a Boy. A movie like this requires a strong hand in some areas and a delicate one in others, and it needs a strong sense of its intentions. And that’s absent here. Instead, we are presented with a series of scenes, some with narration and some without. The narration is a bit of a competition between alcoholic writer-to-be Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro) and his son Nick (Paul Dano), which feels like a throwback to the competing narrations of About a Boy and which initially provides some amusing counterpoints but in the end is just confusing. We understand that Nick was brought up by his mother (Julianne Moore, sadly underutilized) in the total absence of his father, who spent years in prison for fraud. We initially meet Jonathan at his job as a cab driver, which immediately brings up memories of Martin Scorcese’s classic Taxi Driver. And for a few minutes, it almost seems possible that Jonathan could be a kind of aged Travis Bickle – the same sense of false grandeur and self-deception fills both men. (And this whole notion, which exists apart from the true story being told by the film, builds from both the sight of De Niro behind the wheel of a cab again, and from the commitment he brings to the role.) But where Bickle’s intensity was fuel to the earlier movie’s fire, Jonathan’s rages flail as a kind of impotence. And while this may be the point, it still fizzles one interesting element that could have gone somewhere.
MORE SPOILERS: The movie goes back and forth between father and son, with Nick’s journey taking him to a strange situation of living in a converted nightclub, meeting a new girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) and winding up with the job at the homeless shelter. Nick just seems to fall into all of these situations and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. At the same time, Jonathan follows a predictable slide onto the streets, going from having a low-rent cabbie job and a low-rent apartment to losing both and winding up homeless. It’s in the midst of this that the movie has father and son meet, which should be an electric moment but is instead a strange one. Part of this is due to the completely different natures of the performances by Dano and De Niro. Where Dano is a bit spacey and aloof, De Niro is all intensity and coal. Watching them in the same scene is like watching two different movies unspooling at the same time. The next area of strangeness has to do with Nick’s mother. There is an acknowledgement early on that she killed herself at some earlier point in Nick’s life, but nothing is really specified about this. Even when we see the event, which is clearly triggered by her discovering his writing – a signal he is following in his father’s footsteps in spite of all of her efforts to raise him properly – there is still a lot of murkiness about it. And a big part of this is due to the fact that she never ages. Julianne Moore is presented identically when she is seen in photos with the baby of Nick, in scenes with the young actor playing Nick as a 10 year-old and in the scenes where she is seen latest in her life, at which point Nick is played by Dano. The scenario is further muddied by the inclusion of a fantasy vision of her appearing at the homeless shelter in between father and son. Add to this that the final flashbacks about her suicide are intercut with Nick’s escalating drug use and you have a recipe once again for confusion.
MORE SPOILERS: After an extended series of unhappy scenes where Jonathan is thrown out of the homeless shelter and where Nick’s drug use costs him his girlfriend and sends him to NA meetings, the movie lurches to a strange conclusion. First, we see Nick try to find his father in the streets and then take him back to the nightclub/apartment. And in a scene where we need to see either a connection between the men or a realization from Nick that he cannot do so, the movie instead lingers on Jonathan’s opinion of the mother’s suicide – that she did it because she hated herself. And the movie seems to endorse this opinion – if anything, it shows Nick being relieved that his writing isn’t the culprit. The simple wrongness of this moment is almost enough to completely derail the movie right there, but it doesn’t quite do so. The next scene finds Jonathan flat-out telling Nick “You are not me!” which is a strangely direct answer to the question we’ve seen Nick repeatedly asking about himself throughout the movie. (It’s another sign of the problems here that we don’t see this struggle in Nick being represented in any clear fashion, other than that he keeps asking if he is his father.) The movie then makes an incomprehensible jump ahead by what should be five years or so to show Nick as a college grad, teacher and published author, and Jonathan living in Section 8 housing. Except that the movie forgets to change their appearance in any way to denote the passage of time, so once again we have confusion. Add into this the sudden introduction of Nick’s girlfriend and child, followed by a sudden fade to the credits, and you have the perfect ingredients for a totally confusing ending.
FINAL SPOILERS: So what’s the problem with all of this? In a nutshell, there doesn’t seem to be a driving force in the storytelling, or a point to much of what we are seeing. In simple terms, we’re missing the presence of the director. If every we needed evidence that movies cannot direct themselves, we’re looking at it right here. And again, that’s a shame. There were a lot of talented people working on this movie, including the real Nick Flynn and his wife, actress Lili Taylor. Because of their efforts, we can chalk this one up as a nice try, but sadly, no prize.
Being Flynn was released on Blu-ray and standard definition two weeks ago. The Blu-ray holds just the movie in high definition and a very brief featurette that sheds a little light on the production.
VIDEO QUALITY 4/5
Being Flynn is presented in a 1080p AVC 2.40:1 transfer that accurately shows the grittiness of the look of the movie, and a variety of environments and flesh tones. There’s a lot of darkness in this movie, which is appropriate, and the transfer doesn’t disappoint with the black levels.
AUDIO QUALITY 4/5
Being Flynn is presented in an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, as well as a standard DTS mix in Spanish. This is a quiet mix, and there really isn’t very much for the subwoofer to do aside from the occasional moment of music or ambience. But it’s an accurate mix that presents the dialogue as clearly as possible. There’s a bit of mumbling by the cast here and there which sent me to the subtitles, but that’s not a problem with the mix.
SPECIAL FEATURES 1/5
The Blu-Ray presentation of Being Flynn comes with the usual generic bells and whistles, and a single featurette lasting just over 6 minutes.
My Scenes – The usual Blu-ray bookmarking feature is available here, allowing the viewer to set their own bookmarks throughout the film.
BD-Live - This Blu-ray includes access to Universal’s BD-Live online site, allowing for the viewing of trailers online.
pocket BLU – This Blu-ray includes the usual pocket BLU functionality, enabling viewers with appropriate laptop, iPad or smart phone integration to remotely control their Blu-ray player and access some of the bonus content from the separate device
The Heart of Being Flynn (6:04, 1080p) – This is the only featurette on the disc. It’s a fairly quick series of sound bite interviews with the cast and creative staff, intercut with the usual on-set video and film clips. As usual, there’s plenty of mutual back-patting, with writer-director Paul Weitz congratulating himself for being able to do Flynn’s story “without watering it down” with not even a small sense of irony. The most interesting part of the featurette comes from the interviews with Nick Flynn, who is fairly open about his own life and whose face tells a story in itself. (If anything, it’s clear that Paul Dano is probably way too fresh-faced for this role – the real Flynn has lived a much tougher life than what we see in Dano.) Flynn’s best quote comes when he mentions that his father, who is apparently still alive somewhere, was not impressed with hearing that Robert De Niro would be playing him, wondering aloud whether De Niro would really be able to do it.
Subtitles are available for the film and the special features, in English, Spanish and French. A full chapter menu is available for the film.
IN THE END...
Being Flynn could have been a great film. It had many of the ingredients to do so, including a good performance by Robert De Niro – possibly the most notable one he’s given in ten years. But it just didn’t come together and the result is the movie we have before us. The Blu-ray presentation does a good job with the HD picture and sound, and the one featurette here at least provides an introduction to the real Nick Flynn – a man who is infinitely more interesting than the movie made about his life.
Kevin Koster
July 23, 2012.
Equipment now in use in this Home Theater:
Panasonic 65” VT30 Plasma 3D HDTV – set at “THX” picture mode
Denon AVR-3311Cl Receiver
Oppo BDP-93 Blu-ray Player
PS3 Player (used for calculation of bitrates for picture and sound)
5 Mirage Speakers (Front Left/Center/Right, Surround Back Left/Right)
2 Sony Speakers (Surround Left/Right – middle of room)
Martin Logan Dynamo 700 Subwoofer
