"My heart is broke, but I have some glue": Gus Van Sant's Last Days.
Written: Jul 17 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Technically accomplished, well-acted by Michael Pitt, several astounding scenes.
Cons: Narratively threadbare, some less-than-effective and troubling scenes.
The Bottom Line: LAST DAYS continues Gus Van Sant's foray into art cinema, turning the death of Kurt Cobain into flawed but compelling cinema.
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| hkoreeda's Full Review: Last Days |
One of the more intriguing developments in contemporary American cinema is the recent career trajectory of Gus Van Sant. Following a flirtation with Hollywood which saw him attempt a “shot-for-shot” remake of PSYCHO as well as not one but two movies about a friendship between a mentor and a prodigy, Van Sant (happily) is turning his cameras on less mainstream projects. His three most recent films- GERRY, ELEPHANT, and now LAST DAYS- are extremely light on plot, concentrating the audience’s attention instead on images and sounds as they relate to the situations Van Sant presents.
As with Van Sant’s last two films, to synopsize the storyline of LAST DAYS seems beside the point. Though there is a central subject- the final days of a rock star who has decided to kill himself- those audience members who attend the film for the story will be disappointed. Much of the onscreen action focuses on Blake (played by Michael Pitt) as he wanders around his run-down mansion and avoids making contact with other people whenever possible.
In his appearance and behavior, Blake greatly resembles the late Kurt Cobain. While I was never a huge follower of the music coming out of Seattle in the early nineties, I remember being struck by Cobain’s sheer iconic presence. Unlike the preening metal gods and peroxided pop stars of the previous decade, there was little about Cobain (or many of his contemporaries) that felt pre-packaged. “Alternative rock” had less to do with polished musicianship than with an unvarnished style, and what appealed to so many fans of the day was this rawness, which seemed to leave little room for anything that wasn’t genuine. What I always felt distinguished Cobain not just from the movement’s punk influences but also his contemporaries was the way he combined anger and frustration with a kind of resignation that reflected many people’s feelings of powerlessness at the time. It’s this resignation (the guy put out an album called NEVERMIND, after all) that keeps his music feeling modern more than a decade later, and is a key to how Cobain is portrayed in LAST DAYS.
Throughout LAST DAYS, Blake is just killing time prior to committing suicide. As he listens to or plays music or just takes long walks around his property, nothing seems all that important to him. At one he starts preparing a box of macaroni and cheese, but rather than following the directions he boils the pasta for less than a minute before dumping it into the bowl, and then liberally pours in milk as he would a bowl of cereal. Likewise, Blake cares little about communicating with those around him. He speaks in a low, almost inaudible mumble, with his hair obscuring his face, and that’s when he bothers to talk to others at all. He’s just as likely to run from people, be they his band- and housemates (who include Lukas Haas and Asia Argento) or a detective (Ricky Jay) who is brought to the house. One of the stranger moments in the film comes when a representative from the yellow pages shows up at the door, and he discusses renewing the ad for Blake’s (no doubt apocryphal) railroad supply business. In this scene, Blake actually engages with the visitor for the short time, although it’s unclear why he does this. Perhaps it’s the fact that a perfect stranger would take an interest (even a purely professional one) in Blake’s future, when so many of his friends don’t seem to care.
As in ELEPHANT, Van Sant plays with the film’s chronology here. On more than one occasion, we see events from the collective point of Blake’s hangers-on, before shifting to Blake’s perspective. At first glance these chronological shifts feel like an affectation, but upon further reflection the technique serves to underline the rift between Blake and the others in his life. This also sets up the film’s most dynamic sequence, in which Blake natters about in the kitchen while the others dance to Velvet Underground’s dirge-like “Venus in Furs” in the next room. Along with being perhaps the less joyful dance scene since the rooftop dance to “Let’s Go Get Stoned” in Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WH*RE, the scene also functions as a sort of early funeral for Blake, though the others don’t know that at the time. Also, the song’s lyric “on bended knee” echoes an earlier scene in which Blake slowly slumps to the floor while watching a Boyz II Men music video on television (figures THAT’s the song that got stuck in my head).
The “Venus in Furs” scene in followed by an equally awesome scene in which, in a single unbroken take, Blake picks up a guitar and sings a song called “From Death to Birth” in an empty studio. Pitt, who previously played a rocker in HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, plays the song perfectly in character not only for Blake but also for Cobain (I love the moment where he breaks off a guitar string in mid-song). The song itself works as a wail of despair, encapsulating the raw emotion that made Cobain such an iconic figure. But the biggest reason I love this scene is because, while it allows the otherwise inward Blake to peer out of his shell one last time, Van Sant refuses to turn the moment into a last hurrah for the character, a phony triumph that would allow Blake to die on an emotional high note, which would feel completely wrong for the film.
Alas, the rest of the film isn’t up to the standard of these two sequences. The scenes in which Blake’s housemates go about their business become repetitive, and once Van Sant’s rationale behind these characters- they’re blind to their “friend’s” troubles- has been established, they mostly just distract from what’s going on with Blake. Likewise, two visits by older characters are a mixed bag. Ricky Jay’s story about a Chinese magician who died trying to catch a bullet in his teeth is entertaining (Jay’s stories usually are), but it bears little thematic similarity to Blake’s death- “death by misadventure” is something that could never be applied to Blake.
A visit by a record exec played by Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth) is more troubling. Gordon seems to function as an angel of mercy here, offering Blake a way to escape the downward spiral of his life. However, there’s really no way of knowing whether she’s meant to be a real person in his life, or a kind of manifestation of his conscience, representing his momentary second thoughts about suicide. Unlike other visitors to the house, we never see her arrive or drive away, so the latter option isn’t out of the question. After Gordon leaves, Van Sant throws in the film’s only real scene of audience-pandering, as Blake walks into his (absent) daughter’s room, eyes thoughtfully a tiny pair of shoes, and discovers three newly-born kittens.
The events that follow Blake’s death are still turning over in my mind. I liked the scene immediately following the discovery of the body, in which Van Sant employs a double-exposure in a way that’s poetic but also tonally ambiguous (I won’t say more, lest I spoil the surprise). However, I’m less sure of the subsequent scenes, which feel anti-climactic, causing the film to sort of peter out at the finish. Of course, this may be Van Sant’s point- to illustrate the meaninglessness of Blake’s suicide- but I’m not sure Van Sant couldn’t have made this point more vividly. Then again, GERRY’s wrap-up wasn’t especially strong either, but that didn’t stop that movie from being awesome.
As with GERRY and ELEPHANT, LAST DAYS is technically accomplished. Harris Savides’ cinematography, a highlight of the first two films, is just as good here, with his Steadicam used to striking effect, particularly in the early scenes of Blake trudging through the woods. Sound designer Leslie Shatz has been the trilogy’s semi-unsung heroine, and she makes LAST DAYS a model of subjective sound design, underlining Blake’s perspective by tuning out gratuitous sonic information whenever the film adopts his point of view. And kudos to the location scout who found Blake’s mansion, a majestic-looking home that is crumbling and dilapidated on the inside.
In interviews Gus Van Sant has referred to GERRY, ELEPHANT, and LAST DAYS as his “Death trilogy.” GERRY shows its protagonists slowly dying at the hands of nature; ELEPHANT is about a seemingly normal day that sees two students shooting up their high school; and LAST DAYS deals with suicide. I think GERRY is the trilogy’s strongest offering largely because it’s so anti-narrative that one must concentrate solely on visual and audio imagery to find meaning, turning the film into a cinematic Rorschach test. However, I prefer LAST DAYS to ELEPHANT. Both films takes their cues from real-life incidents, but while ELEPHANT was objectionable due to its insistence on seeing its characters as nothing more than a menagerie of doomed stereotypes, LAST DAYS manages (to a certain degree) to capitalize on Kurt Cobain’s iconic status without it feeling exploitative. It no doubt required a certain amount of audacity on Van Sant’s part to build a film around a character who is this closed-in, but Blake is close enough to the popular collective image of Cobain that it allows the audience to fill in the blanks with their own memories. With what we know about Cobain, both from his life and his songs, suicide may very well have been inevitable for him, and in a way this inevitability is what LAST DAYS is really about.
Recommended:
Yes
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hkoreeda
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Member: Paul Clark
Location: Ohio
Reviews written: 35
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