Following its premiere at the New York Film Festival, director Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” released nationally Nov. 11, has garnered mixed reactions. The film itself is not particularly noteworthy, though it contains solid performances from the lead actors. It is the often-mesmerizing visuals that have generated so much attention and discussion about the film. Lee, continuing his penchant for pushing the envelope of special effects as he did in “Life of Pi” (2012), shot “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” in an astonishing 120 frames per second, in 4K resolution and, for the cherry on top, in 3-D.
However, because of the technology required to project the film, only two theaters nationwide are capable of displaying it in this format, what Lee calls “The Whole Shebang.” The result is an image that carries 40 times the information of a standard movie as there are quintuple the frames, quadruple the pixels and then it is all doubled for stereoscopic 3-D.
From the very first scene with Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) stumbling out of bed, the visual clarity and smoothness are jaw-dropping, and the ocular overload never ceases. Lee has lamented how the format exposed so much of what goes into a film, explaining that the entire process had to be rethought. When the audience can see individual drops of condensation on a plate of food and minuscule bits of fraying fabric on Billy Lynn’s uniform epaulets, nothing can be faked. Despite the efforts of Lee and his cast and crew, some of the seams remain exposed. For one, the foley — the sound effects added in post-production — sometimes seems incongruous with what is on the screen, such as when a pat on the shoulder sounds suspiciously heavy.
Though some have dismissed the film’s visual experimentation as a failure, that is to overlook its moments of success. Lee’s film is serviceable, but is certainly a rare misstep in his filmography in terms of its success in articulating a unique message or simply entertaining the viewer. As a vehicle for demonstrating both the promise and the limits of hyperrealism, its unusual blend of settings – intimate conversations, a football game complete with halftime show spectacular, and wartime battle scenes – provides a thorough picture of the format’s strengths and weaknesses.
The elimination of the motion blur seen at lower frame rates in the more frenetic sequences holds great promise for certain genres. Lee only shows a few moments of the football game where Lynn and his squad are to be honored in the halftime show, but even those glimpses offer a tantalizing idea of what sports televised in ultra-high frame rate and definition would be like. When Lynn grapples with an Iraqi insurgent in a drainage tunnel in a scene reminiscent of the knife fight in “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), ending on a close-up of the man’s face as he draws his dying breaths, the realism is more unsettling than any amount of gore could be.
It often feels as though the theater is only separated from what is happening on the screen by an actual pane of perfectly transparent glass. That unmatched closeness to the film provides an effect that it is hard to imagine could be achieved any other way. Surprisingly, the other arena where the format is particularly effective is in the close-up shots of emotional dialogue that permeate the film. Lee likely chose to shoot his actors with their heads filling the screen and their eyes looking directly into the camera because it allows audience members to put themselves in the shoes of the listening characters. These close-ups are frequently unsettling, but they force the viewer to confront the emotions of the characters. The resolution and the frame rate create a rawness that, at the actors’ best, make a viewer feel almost guilty for any hint of cynicism about their feelings.
It is perhaps in this dichotomy between real and unreal, between acting and effects that appear natural versus created, that the greatest quality of the format lies. By shining such a bright light on every aspect of the filmmaking process, an elevation of technique is required, providing a challenge to actors and filmmakers to create an utterly immersive experience that can withstand the scrutiny of the format.
Regardless of the disappointing critical and box office reception to “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” it would be a mistake to judge the future of ultra high-definition and high frame rate cinema based solely on Lee’s experiment (or Peter Jackson’s tentative use of the technique in his “The Hobbit” trilogy). More may not always be better – more pixels, more frames – but sometimes it is, and the potential of the format lies in that chance.
Ang Lee's ultra high-definition, high frame rate cinematic experiment
