Last Days
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Gus Van Sant's Last Days was inspired by Kurt Cobain (famous guitarist-singer with Nirvana, also famous heroin addict and suicide). However, Van Sant pulls back a bit, saying the story is fictional, and calling the main character “Blake.” But, of course, it is Kurt in his last days – the alienation from everyone, the disenchantment with the music business, the hiding out in his house, the sunglasses, the cardigan, the heroin, the suicide (even posed in the way Kurt died).
Van Sant - thank goodness - doesn't bother with a story. One isn’t needed; everyone knows the story. Instead the film is very visual - plot isn’t needed and not really script – there’s mumbling, some singing, meaningless dialogue - it’s a silent film for modern times (well not completely silent – it's another Van Sant film with Hildegard Westerkamp on the soundtrack, adding sounds that blend subtly and seamlessly with the images). But it is a film of images: Blake by a creek singing, “Home on the Range,” wandering around, hiding from people, strumming a guitar, and passing out. The setting is a big decaying unheated house - the people surrounding him are hangers-on, also high, asking him for money, music advice or just using his place as a crash-pad. The house is surrounded by the green of the Pacific Northwest - not a cozy green but a cold dysfunctional green.
The films where Van Sant moves away from plot, such as Last Days and Elephant are his best. However, enjoyable as they are, there is something wrong about them - it is clearly his version, his vision of the story. There is a humorous scene where Blake, high on heroin and wearing a dress lets in a telephone book representative who speaks to him in a sales pitch (and as if there is nothing unusual). The next couple of visitors are Mormons, doing their door-to-door missionary work. At first it looks like a set-up for a cheap joke then we see their faces as they talk about their aims (the words again are not important) - they are lost boys, too. Lost attractive boys, like Blake, like the high and rock crazed person singing along to the Velvet Underground record, like the kids in the high school in elephant. Like David Lynch, Van Sant comes from a visual arts background and both (Lynch, particularly with the television series Twin Peaks) produce visually attractive, eroticized-fetishized depictions of their characters. It's a certain look, and if you are in the mood, you can go along with it – it can be attractive. It stands out because of its attractiveness - the great mass of films and television can be full of sex but also absolutely bland and unattractive (one does not usually notice as easily that a visual-sexual point of view is being put across in mass-market movies just because its artlessness is obligatory and widespread).
If you are in the mood for it, Van Sant's (better) movies can have their appeal; however, when you step back and think that heroin/suicide (Last Days) and mass murder (Elephant) and are a bit messier Van Sant depicts they may not appeal at all.