158. Last Days

Song - Mooie Dag (Blof)

Movie: Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005)

Gus van Sant is one of the last examples of a healthy Hollywood studio system. He is happy to make mid-budget (comedy-)dramas as a gun for hire, add a bit of a personal touch to them, make some money and then disappear out of the mainstream for a couple of years to follow his own whims. Those whims seem to carry him towards languid explorations of death and alienation, which is not quite my thing. But I am a big fan of his mainstream work. Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite films, and To Die For, Milk and Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot are wonderful films you can easily imagine being much worse. I even quite like Promised Land and Finding Forrester. With the exception of To Die For (maybe the bitterest media satire since Network) all these films share a gentle, bemused humanism and have a proudly, independent and even sneakily countercultural spirit. They are implicitly or explicitly about the creation or sustenance of communities, values and lives outside of mainstream culture and about how these communities, values and lives are worth defending. It's worth noting that even the triumphant ending of Good Will Hunting does not involve Matt Damon getting a career, or even any kind of certainty. What makes the ending triumphant is that Will Hunting has accepted that he can be loved for who he is and all his eccentricities and flaws. 

Last Days' Blake (Michael Pitt), a character based on Kurt Cobain, has not accepted that, and now he is going through life like a half-dead unkempt zombie mumbling to himself, barely noticing anyone around him. It['s probably a rather good depiction of someone who has utterly and completely given up on life after years of addictions, insanity, the pressure of fame and who knows what else. Sadly, it's just completely uninteresting and rather exhausting to follow Blake around for 1,5 hour, though you sort of admire how little Van Sant cares about audience expectations. 

Even more admirable is Michael Pitt's discipline; he has an utterly thankless role. Most of the time we seem him from the back, in the dark, or from the side. When we see him from the front, he is either far away from the camera, or his hair hides his face. In one shot, just when he turns to the camera, he takes a puff from a cigar, smoking it with the palm of his hand obscuring half his face. Throughout the film he is talking to himself, but most of it is unintelligible. When he is not doing that, he is sitting, or crawling despondently, in an almost slow-motion. Twice in the film he picks up a guitar to play. The first time the camera moves slowly away from him as we see him through a hazy window, while the diegetic sound of the guitar is overwhelmed by non-diegetic music. The second time, he is in a dark room at the edge of the frame, barely allowing us to see him. I am rather indifferent towards Nirvana and Cobain, but felt like inviting comparisons between Blake and him was rather unfair and unnecessarily unflattering towards Cobain. 

Out of context and from a technical point of view that dolly shot the first time we see Blake play guitar is really great. There is another great shot in which we see two people sleeping on the first floor of the house, with behind them a TV showing a karate match, while outside of the window we see Blake yakking around in the garden. The rest of the film isn't too bad to look at either. Van Sant has a good eye and his approach is not entirely unreasonable. He has obviously tried to make a film that fits and mirrors Blake's state of mind and that is as detached from him as he is from life. That this ultimately doesn't lead to anything worthwhile may be the point, but it's not a particularly insightful one. If you want to see an actually great Van Sant art film that tries some similar things, Elephant is the way to go.