LAST DAYS (2005)
A Seattle musician's life and career are reminiscent of those of Kurt Cobain.
There’s nothing glamorous about the life of a rock n’ roll superstar in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Though protagonist Blake (Michael Pitt) doesn’t share the same name as the Nirvana lead singer, he’s a transparent stand-in for Kurt Cobain. Instead of taking a very general approach to Cobain’s life, Last Days is far more intimate and personal —on the surface, at least —than a typical biopic. Eschewing broad strokes that attempt to craft an overview of a lifetime, Van Sant’s 2005 drama hones in on the last days of its semi-fictional rock star, whose drug addiction overshadows any chance of happiness or normality.
This is a dreary, bleak work, slow-moving to the point of absurdity. Van Sant crafts compelling compositions on occasion, sketching out the pained existence of someone who is not quite here in this world. Blake is, in effect, already a ghost. One can easily imagine the deathly cold seeping through the windows in the old house that Blake and his friends stay in, as well as the visceral, skin-crawling sensation that afflicts this beaten-down protagonist most of the time. His friendships are meaningless, hardly amounting to a shout in the void in a film that finds purpose in carving out a giant chasm beneath Blake’s feet.
Throughout Last Days Van Sant keeps digging a hole that its protagonist will never escape from, a fact that, even if this movie wasn’t centred on Cobain and his tragic and untimely death, would have been clear as day not long after the film’s lengthy opening scene. In this sequence, where Blake wanders through the countryside until he reaches a river, then stops for a moment to cup his hands in the stream and hungrily gulp down water, a trick is played on the viewer. I fully expected the American director to uncover some poetry in this moment, where even a hopelessly wayward and lost soul can find reprieve. Blake is doing what his very distant ancestors would have, which could be both touching and tragic in how it shows that his humanity has not been robbed of him through addiction, but that he’s so desperately far from normal human experiences in this world.
Last Days is too cynical for poetry (though there’s an argument to be made that introducing notes of hope in a story as uniformly dark as this would be a cruel way to treat this protagonist). Instead, it is intentionally mundane, comprised of scenes that don’t just defy profundity, but show scorn towards it. The end result is a failure for two reasons, the most obvious being that it amounts to little in the way of entertainment. Drug addiction is ugly and tortured, but that quality is amplified tenfold for a movie that compiles these stark moments without accounting for anything remotely meaningful to be tacked onto them.
Most of Blake’s dialogue consists of unintelligible mumblings; even when he’s capable of conversation he takes an age to get his point across. When he can be understood, his words are of such little consequence, and have taken such an effort to be put out into the world, that the people around him must surely be asking themselves why they even bothered to engage him in the first place. I asked myself the same question with regards to watching this film.
In Van Sant’s preceding movie, Elephant (2003), the second in his trilogy of films centred on death that was completed by Last Days, he takes a similarly slow approach to gruesome, direly cynical subject matter. But not only do meaningful conversations, actions, and events take place in that film, they go beyond sketching out the bare details of these characters’ lives. By focusing on multiple characters throughout the film, bland scenes that go nowhere and are a retread of previous moments (a fact of life’s monotony that Last Days exploits to an aggravating extent) are excised, leaving a piece of slow cinema that justifies its journey. Elephant does not meander, because the event it is leading towards— a school shooting —isn’t just harrowing, but definitive. It brings the film together, rather than just coming up with a plausible endpoint.
In Elephant, there are revealing moments that showcase actual characters, while Last Days is merely an endless ramble, signifying nothing, going nowhere. For those who haven’t personally dealt with addiction or been near someone who has, it doesn’t take a particularly vivid imagination to conjure up the kinds of images that sketch the hollowed-out existence of an addict, particularly when it comes to something as widespread in culture, media, and life as drug addiction. Showing the remnants of Blake’s torturous existence seemingly ad infinitum doesn’t just say nothing about the character or his real-life counterpart, it intentionally doesn’t try to offer any commentary.
Last Days also fails on another fundamental level when one considers that its ultra-cynical depiction of Cobain’s life only took root because it was centred on a cultural icon. This is perhaps the only area where Van Sant is trying to say something with this film. He is interested in tackling the mythological aspects of celebrity culture, especially for artists that define genres and generations, laying these legends bare to depict the harsh reality that lurks beneath them.
But this movie only adds to Cobain’s mythology, taking a depressingly common experience and turning it into a work of art that lacks reflection or insight. Throughout the years in the public consciousness there has been Kurt Cobain the Artist, or Kurt Cobain the Cultural Icon, with Van Sant adding his own entry into this canon over a decade after Cobain’s passing: Kurt Cobain the Addict. It’s the saddest, cruellest legacy of the lot, and just as dishonest as the rest of these lofty ideas people have in their heads about figures like Cobain and what his life signified. Only those closest to him could ever begin to understand the person, in all his glory and disappointment, beneath the persona that feels immortal only because he was on this Earth for such a short time.
While it never claims to represent anything other than a few days in this character’s life, a core piece of this emotional puzzle is missing when no notes of hope are offered. In a sorrowful piece of art hope can be the most damning thing of all, while without it tragedy can become dreary. Dreariness dominates Last Days, where even Michael Pitt’s strong leading performance is unable to anchor these meandering scenes. Pitt’s career has gone against the grain time and time again, and yet for all of the interesting character studies this talented actor has uncovered throughout it, it still feels as though he is due the kind of show-stopping performance that can define an actor’s career. If Last Days’ film’s hollowed-out drudgery had been keen to access a stronger emotional palette, this role could have been it.
Even the film’s rare compelling moments are squandered by being overlong, like when Blake composes a piece of music, alone in every sense of the word. The lyrics are faltering, some of them not yet cohering around logic, but they are pained nevertheless. This gives way to a roughly four-minute performance that begins to rest more and more on filler words to pad out this improvised piece. What started as a tragic moment soon becomes rote, a matter of feeling out the rhythm of a song and gaining some clarity on where to go forward with it in the process.
Any other director would have given us something to feel here. But just when Van Sant gets the audience to glimpse that emotion, he pulls this feeling out from under them to hammer home that this is not a melodrama, but a rough reconstruction of reality, which is the saddest thing of all. On that very last point he is correct, as Blake’s final days look painfully lonely. But that’s not a great achievement in and of itself; just about any competent artist can routinely pummel their subjects to elicit misery in viewers.
Van Sant continually goes against the grain throughout Last Days, with an approach that will confound general moviegoers. But even diehard film fans should be wary of an experience that, in its remarkably cynical way, is just as fawning over its protagonist as those who view Cobain as an icon instead of a human being. Ghosts are abound in Last Days, especially towards the end of this film in a sickeningly pointed way. Just don’t expect much humanity to be found in this bleak drama.
USA | 2005 | 97 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
writer & director: Gus Van Sant.
starring: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Patrick Glenn, Ricky Jay, Nicole Vicius & Ryan Orion.
