Last Days

One of the many paradoxes of cinema: It's easy to make a boring action movie (ask Brett Rattner or Paul W.S. Anderson), hard to do the same with a realistic drama comprised of everyday routine. Gus Van Sant is a master of mundanity, and I mean that as a compliment. While his three most recent films are undoubtedly filled with scenes which are boring, there's no question about the skill it took to make them so. Was I bored while watching Last Days? Certainly. Do I consider it a great film? Definitely.

Structurally and stylistically Last Days mirrors Van Sant's 2003 film, Elephant, but where Elephant took the Columbine massacre and basically recreated it, Last Days is far less "faithful" to its source material, Kurt Cobain's suicide. Which works for me; I'm unsure whether Van Sant changed the plot due to his own artistic vision or whether he was afraid Courtney Love would sue and have the film's distribution halted, but, regardless, it was a sound decision. He managed to make a film inspired by Cobain's suicide that isn't a cliche, and that is perhaps the film's ultimate triumph.

Van Sant is of a dying breed: an auteur in the truest sense, a director who doesn't make his films too abstract or weird simply for the sake of being abstract or weird, instead aiming for realism. (I'd love to see his film adaptation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.) Perhaps that's too middle ground for audiences on both sides of the moviegoing spectrum: Van Sant's last three films have been neither grossly gratuitous nor subtly sedated (please forgive me my alliteration, father, for I have sinned): they exist in their own world, a world strikingly similar to ours, where people act mundanely, utter unintelligible words, and yet still manage to be wholly interesting. People tend to watch films to escape reality or make their own reality seem more vivid than it actually is, and it serves as a pleasant shock when one sees a film that, instead of being a conduit for escapism or reality on steroids, conforms to one's boring existence. And it's profoundly engaging. It is art imitating life in its simplest, truest form.

It sounds contradictory, but dullness, so long as it's not our own, is gripping. This is what rivited Jimmy Stewart's character in Rear Window, what boosts the ratings of a myriad television reality shows. I truly believe that our imaginations have been subjected to so much fantasy and hyper-realism in media that natural selection of the psyche is leading us back towards media that is a much more honest reflection of ourselves. In the case of reality TV this is fool's gold; but Van Sant is onto something here, and I sincerely hope that his ostensible trilogy becomes a quadrilogy, a quintilogy, and continues to multiply ad infinitum like wet Mogwais.

On to the film proper, Last Days tells the story of Blake, a rock star escaped from rehab. He wanders through the woods until he finds his way to what can only be described as a Victorian-style flophouse. The place is inhabited by a motley crew of Blake's friends -- though that term should be used loosely, because he's barely regarded and only solicited when one of them wants something. Likewise, Blake stalks about the house like a phantom (a phantom who dresses in women's undergarments and cooks Kraft Dinner like a retard, mind you), isolated and never making even the most basic social connection, not even when, near the film's end, he ventures outside in an attempt to interact with others.

It's clear that Blake is a drug addict and that he kills himself, although no scenes of either drug abuse or suicide are shown. What is unclear, though, is the torment of which they are a result. Is Blake weighed down by the pressures of fame? Does he have psychological issues? Is he in a Darwinian sense an unevolved species, in a commercial one a defective model? Or, perhaps like the character Kirilov in Dostoevsky's The Devils, does he believe that suicide is the singular expression of free will?

These questions and many more are never answered. Good. A typical biopic would spoon-feed its audience with theories and answers. Last Days opts for realism, and in doing so stays true to its inspiration and, most essentially, its reflection of the truth vis-a-vis the beauty of our miraculously dull existence.

Rating: 4/4 *_*



Note: Ricky Jay -- who along with Tom Wilkinson and Brian Cox are the MSG of cinema: they make every movie in which they appear taste better -- has a great cameo as a private investigator. His Chin Ling Fu/Chun Ling Soo anecdote is among the best pieces of dialogue in modern cinema.