LAST DAYS

This film originally earned a no-pie rating when it was released because I honestly didn't know what to make of it. And I didn't know how it should be rated, so I left it blank and have given it five slices to fit the new Moviepie model.

I thought that perhaps writing about it would prove therapeutic in some way, or allow me to work through its complexities in order to formulate a decisive opinion….but I’m no closer to figuring it out than I was when its closing credits rolled.

Writer-director Gus Van Sant has created a monumentally stark but curiously affecting project that’s more easily described by listing what it’s not. It’s not a biopic. It’s not a drama. In fact, it doesn’t exactly have any kind of discernable story. It’s not linear. It’s not dialogue-driven. It’s not character-driven. It’s not action-driven. In fact, it’s not exactly driven at all. It’s just kind of…there to be digested.

Unfolding almost like a dream that’s slipping away in bits and pieces, the film centers on a very Kurt Cobain-esque Seattle grunge rocker named Blake (Michael Pitt), who seems to exist in a state of perpetual stupor. He doesn’t walk, he shuffles. He doesn’t speak, he mumbles. He’s barely audible, often unintelligible and he’s forever hidden behind shaggy hair, weird glasses or the haze of a drug-induced fog. The events (or non-events) of the film take place over the course of a couple days at a remote, run-down mansion in the woods where Blake is seeking sanctuary after fleeing a drug-rehab program of some kind. Various aimless, mostly nameless folks (including Lukas Haas, Asia Argento and Scott Green) drift around, equally dazed, in the background but seem more like shadows. People listen to music, Blake makes macaroni and cheese, Mormons stop by for a bit of preaching and everything is filmed in long, continuous takes. It’s minutiae taken to an art form.

For much of the film, it feels like absolutely nothing is happening. And, sometimes, nothing is. More than a few scenes had me rolling my eyes and heaving sighs of frustration over the seeming banality and tedium of what I was watching.

But then, amid the celluloid din, moments of sheer brilliance sticking up like red poppies in a snow-covered field. Scenes that put a lump in my throat and held my attention so completely that I felt absorbed by the screen. One involves Blake sitting alone, playing guitar and unleashing a song so heartbreakingly beautiful – and so sharply indicative of the intellect and soul buried beneath his bleary-eyed, barely comprehensible self –  that it comes as a cinematic punch to the solar plexus. I found myself tearing up and suddenly getting it – the movie, its tone, its purpose. Not to mention marveling at Pitt’s musical abilities and his complete immersion into the character. There is nary a misstep in his performance.

But be warned (again): Last Days is very, very slow. It’s hazy. It’s hungover. Watching it is a bit like listening to someone whose storytelling consists of droning on endlessly about seemingly insignificant details. But only later, when you stand back from what you’ve seen and regard Last Days as a literal portrait, do those details that seem pointless on the surface reveal themselves to be tiny brushstrokes that, pieced together, make up a much larger, much richer canvas.