After Images
LAST DAYS
An idiosyncratic director tells a familiar legend.
With Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Scott Green
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant
IN GUS VAN SANT'S LATEST film-á-clef, the young, gifted, unstable musician Blake (Michael Pitt) is an afterimage of Kurt Cobain, and by fictionalizing his film's story, as he did in Elephant, rather than attempting a genuine biopic, Van Sant frees himself to invent, explore and reflect (and also, no doubt, to avoid a lawsuit from Courtney Love).
Last Days presents Blake's bleak exit in disconnected patches, jumping around randomly within its constricted time and place of what seems to be less than 24 hours in Blake's life (it takes a while to catch on that Van Sant is doing this). It begins with a walkabout in the woods - the paper bracelet on Blake's wrist tells us that he's escaped from some sort of hospital - and ends with his suicide, which Van Sant spares us from witnessing (a good choice and a bad one, but at least a choice worth discussing).
Gerry had a similar minimalist narrative strategy. But that film was a metaphor: We never learned the characters' real names, so we could append our own interpretations onto them and the film. In Last Days, we know Blake's name and circumstance, and yet the narrative, if you can call it that, never focuses on a thread or a sensation, except the requisite feeling of melancholy that comes from knowing a beautiful young man is going to die.
It's as if we're seeing the story through the eyes of a spirit Blake, looking down at his terrestrial life, like Eliot's Prufrock, after having ascended his stairway to heaven - which, in the movie's concise and ethereal denouement, Blake's naked soul literally does.
This is a wonderful conceit, except that Van Sant's incoherent movie is even more self-indulgent than his shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. It's not just that he needlessly disorients us with a choppy narrative and furtive characters. Van Sant doesn't seem to care about them all very much, and he certainly doesn't seem to know what Cobain's (or anyone's) last 24 hours were like. It's like he just wanted to film some images that he had tossing about in his head, but then forget that he's making a work of art meant to communicate and explore. If people get it, then good for them. And if they don't - well, that's their issue. (There's really not much to get, by the way, beyond the apparent and the banal.)
Van Sant has always been an uneven filmmaker: enigmatic, idiosyncratic, solipsistic, impenetrable, or sometimes just plain odd. Lately, though, he's been satisfyingly the first three more than the last two: Elephant, his meditation on the Columbine killings, was a disquieting montage of the inexplicable; and Gerry, a bleak, minimalist, two-character drama, explored his favorite theme of one's place and identity in the world (think Good Will Hunting, but without dialogue or plot).
Last Days interrupts his streak, and it would be unbearable were it not for Pitt (The Dreamers, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), a strangely absorbing young actor. Where his co-stars improvise their characters clumsily, Pitt seems to experience his. He only speaks two or three full sentences in Last Days. The rest of his articulations are slurred and mumbled, except when he wants us to hear a telling phrase, like "can't die today."
A lesser actor might have hit such a weighty phrase like a bull's-eye. But Pitt is so absorbingly focused that everything he says and does feels eerily natural. We hear Blake's music twice, the second time a full song performed by Pitt. Van Sant keeps the camera at a distance during the tune, and Blake's silky blond hair hangs over his face, so all we can see are his hands playing his guitar, and all we can hear, more or less, is his lyrical death howl.
Van Sant has been openly gay since the start of his career, and while some of his films have winnowing gay subtexts, he's never made a mainstream, gay-themed feature film. Can you imagine Spike Lee having nothing to say about being black? One wishes that Van Sant would give us, just once, a provocative point of view on something that virtually every other well-established director knows nothing about.
In the meantime, we're left with his ambiguous snippets. There's a bizarre scene in Last Days where Luke (Lukas Haas), one of Blake's band mates, tells Blake about a sexual affair with a woman so glorious that it caused him to write a song about it. Then Scott (Scott Green), another member of the band, escorts Luke from the room, and as Blake plays and sings all alone downstairs, Luke and Scott undress and have sex in an upstairs bedroom. (Notice that Van Sant was too busy being creative to think up names for his characters.)
Like everything else in Last Days - the courteous Yellow Pages salesman, the door-to-door Mormon missionary lads - this passage comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, like the fleeting boy-on-boy shower make-out scene in Elephant. Van Sant clearly has something in mind with all of this, something he's not making his films about. I just wish he'd quit jerking off and tell us what it is.