It's hard to bounce back after winning an Oscar.
This is true of actors as well as filmmakers.
Surprise winner of the statuette for best film in 2019 for the road trip in the heart of segregated America
Green Book: on the roads of the South
, director Peter Farrelly has once again drawn his inspiration from a completely mind-blowing true story.
Presented at the Toronto Film Festival and online on Apple TV+,
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
recounts John Donohue's crazy journey through Vietnam as the Vietcong Tet offensive of January 1968 approaches. Army veteran and now lazy employee of the merchant navy, John Donohue accepts at the end of a drunken night the bet to bring his childhood friends, deployed on the front, a palette of their favorite beer.
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Information manipulation
A patriot, Donohue sees his odyssey as a gesture of support for the morale of the troops.
He arrives on the spot as a candid, unaware of the danger in which he places himself and his comrades.
With incredible patter, he poses as a CIA agent so he can navigate from base to base.
But from adventures to setbacks, Donohue opens his eyes to the ambiguities and realities of the conflict: torture, napalm bombing, post-traumatic stress, propaganda from the general staff...
With much less subtlety than in Green Book, Peter Farrelly concocts a comedy loaded with good feelings to evoke a drama of the 20th century.
It devitalizes his narrative.
He struggles to make his hero, camped by a mustachioed Zac Efron, anything other than an unconscious and egocentric tourist.
The scenes of camaraderie are too brief to move.
Clichés - jaded journalists, incompetent generals - weigh down an ensemble that already lacks grace.
There remains the indomitable Russell Crowe as a seasoned photojournalist who takes the naive Donohue under his wing and gives him a surplus of charisma, savvy and conviction.
Read alsoSur Arte, the superb volcanic rushes of Werner Herzog
Through his correspondent character, the film touches on a more interesting subject, in any case less anecdotal.
The manipulation and filtering of information skews the representation of the conflict and the perception of the validity of Washington's intervention.
"It's not the truth that hurts, but the lies
," declaims the star of
Gladiator
in a thinly veiled allusion to our current turpitudes.
