Bizarre Last Days Certainly Unique

Gus Van Sant’s newest eccentric creation “Last Days” is a tough nut to crack. I saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival and my initial impression walking out of the press screening was one of almost amazed disbelief. A surreal day-in-the-life dreamscape of a drugged-out rock star’s final hours, the whole things is an existential head-scratcher unlike anything else to hit theater screens this year.

The thing is, as annoyed and bewildered as I was then, over a month later I still can’t get the thing out of my head. Inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain, Van Sant paints a picture of man seemingly trapped behind a drug-induced haze all of his own creation. He walks, trots, strolls and even crawls, the central figure so clueless to the things going on around him he might as well be a ghost. Of course, maybe that’s the director’s point; that creative genius fueled on things like heroin and cocaine are destined to destroy the very things they helped create.

Not that I really know. Van Sant is never exactly clear on this or any other point in “Last Days.” In fact, he never shows the main character, a skuzzy washed-out greasy blonde haired grunge rocker named Blake (Michael Pitt, “The Dreamers”) shooting up or doing any dope whatsoever other than nicotine. (At least, I think he’s only smoking cigarettes. They’re so purposefully ambiguous it’s virtually impossible to tell.) He just appears at the start as an already completely disassociated space case, wandering, smoking and continuously munching while going from Point A all the way to falling face-first into Point B.

Along the way he bumps into bandmates, girlfriends, club promoters and a Yellow Pages advertising rep. Blake forges through streams, plays some riffs on his guitar, listens to some classic rock and tries on a dress. He goes into town, passes out on a floor, spends the nights in the forest and avoids a private investigator (amusingly played by Mamet regular Ricky Jay). No matter what he does, Blake does everything completely detached from it; a passenger in his own body trapped behind a blank set of eyes seeing no further than what’s directly in front of his nose.

If “Gerry” was about two guys lost in the desert and “Elephant” was about a kid lost in high school, “Last Days” is about a man lost within his own home. In other words, it’s not really about anything while still managing to take stock of everything as time slowly marches by. I can’t say it is entirely successful. Van Sant in his bizarrely obtuse avant-garde mode is certainly more than enough to make even the most accepting viewer want to pull up stakes and beat it. But whereas I hated “Gerry” and absolutely adored (and was devastated by) “Elephant,” I fall someplace sort of in the middle on this one, not exactly sure if it is something to admire or not.

And yet, here I am so many moons later still fixating on every nook and cranny. Like in their past two collaborations, Harris Savides shoots things so beautifully, in such verisimilar fanaticism that the dreamlike quality of it all becomes singularly mesmerizing. It is as if Van Sant decided to revisit the French New Wave and play it right in the middle of Generation X’s continued sociological disjointed malaise. Everything is an enigma, a question impossible to answer because the question isn’t made even remotely clear.

So what the final verdict? I all honesty I don’t rightly know. Having seen it twice now I can say plainly the movie makes as little sense on a second viewing as it does on a first, and yet the pure unadulterated cinematic originality of it all only grows in its intoxication. “Last Days” stews in the gut and takes hold of the senses to a point it almost becomes an obsession. Whatever the final evaluation, it’s certainly unique, and after a couple of years there with people trying to label Van Sant a sellout he certainly proves them more than wrong with this.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)