Critics reviews

The young man's valor in a firefight have made him a media hero, so now everyone wants a piece of him—from the Bush administration selling the war to TV sports broadcasters chasing Nielsen numbers to a cheerleader seducing him in order to promote her homespun Christian values. With that setup, screenwriter Jean-Christophe Castelli should have been able to come up with some sharper barbs, which might have mitigated the uneven tone, inelegant editing, and scattered narrative.

It's an impressive spectacle in fits and starts, but the movie never quite decides whether it's lamenting civilians' failure to appreciate the sacrifices made by our troops or lampooning our desire to commodify their courage. Fountain's book succeeds in creating a prismatically complex array of angles; the movie version remains stubbornly on the surface—a surface, moreover, that only a tiny number of people will view as intended.

I saw the film without 3D or super-speedy projection—the way it will play in most theaters. In a conventional format, the film's luminosity and exactness are still impressive. But they're not _expressive_. How could they be? Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is essentially a one-character movie with just two fully dramatized sequences.

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning "Life of Pi," made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," which displays many of Lee's skills but does little to advance the case for high-frame-rate cinematography.

The clarity of Lee's image is certainly impressive but at 120 frames a second, what we're watching ceases, on some level, to be cinema... A few weeks after its NYFF screening, I got the chance to rewatch Billy Lynn in good old 24 frames per second — no 3D, no high-end, futuristic, ultra-super-duper-mega-projectors, no nothing. And … it looked _good_. It worked far better as a regular movie.

Lee's intent was to use the technology to capture the subtle signals imparted by his actors' faces. In theory, the idea is noble. But the problems with Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk are intricately tied to its special technology, even though most people won't be able to see it in its intended format. The picture is earnest and at times quietly moving. But tight close-ups alone—and Lee uses an enormous number of them—don't intensify the drama of a work, or a performance.

Through these eyes, Lee's vision of red-state America in thrall to a vision of its own exceptionalism carries an even harsher sting than he may have intended. By the end of this strained, startling cinematic flashback, it's possible to leave the theater feeling both a rush of anger and, more surprisingly, a pang of nostalgia.

Though Lee's brief battlefield flashbacks are affecting, the rest of the movie offers emotion by numbers. The plot's mechanical quality is reinforced by the high-tech 3-D cinematography, which, by means of an ultra-high frame rate, exceptional brightness, and unprecedented resolution, is meant to heighten the film's reality but instead displays its artifice; the action seems staged inside a light box.

Some may be unable to see past the Avatar-grade visual intensity of scenes that can hum with a stage-like sense of presence. But where the high-frame-rate TV-news pellucidity of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit clashed with the fantastical subject, it's a prime fit here for [this film]. Where then do we go from here? For young men like Billy, that's an open question, but for cinema, wherever it leads, Lee has blazed a trail and taken a risk, which is more than one can say for so very many.

Lee's much-hyped technological gambit fosters an unusual, exciting intimacy... but the image seems to flatten whenever bodies are crowded together. Any temptation to reach into the screen is prompted less in thrall to the pull of virtual reality than by a desire to move props and bodies around to somehow conjure a more cohesive setting. Some of the novel's best aspects become the clumsy in the film, whose ungainly visuals are a fitting match for the unruly mixture of performance styles.

Most audiences won't have the chance to watch "Billy Lynn" at its high frame rate, which is probably for the best, because the fancy presentation mostly serves as a distraction. "Billy Lynn" contains a layered premise that suits a reliable cinematic approach even without the fancy bells and whistles — namely, crosscutting, in this case between two radically different environments: a war zone and a football game, leading to a contrast that has ironic and at times perceptive results.

It winds up being a wearying experience, not because of its emotional content but because of its lack of cohesion and its ultimate collapse into gross and unearned sentimentality. The impression this movie leaves is one of hapless and anxious super-clear cut-outs interacting with either blurred co-players or blurred backgrounds that look less like life and more like near-sightedness.