Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (October 28, 2005)

Last Days

Warner Home Video VHS & DVD

1hr 36mins

Director: Gus Van Sant

Gus Van Sant's eerily silent "Last Days" is an adult ghost story for Halloween. It chronicles the last hours of the life of rock singer Blake (modeled on Kurt Cobain) as he wanders his antique house and the adjacent ancient forest. He is human, but so oblivious to his life that he is essentially a spirit enroute to oblivion. If you want a small synopsis of the film it would be as follows: Blake skinny dips, makes a campfire, uses heroin off-screen, dresses up and plays with a shotgun, avoids his friends, plays with some instruments, buys some drugs and is found dead the next day. However, this is only the framework that director Van Sant chooses to guide his audience through his most affecting and challenging film, one that could be considered his pinnacle in recent years.

Van Sant hit a stride a few years ago after a series of mainstream offerings that stemmed from the good ("Good Will Hunting") to the bad ("Finding Forester") to the weirdly ugly (the "Psycho" remake). However, 2002's "Gerry" showed the director in a strangely contemplative mood. He adopted a style that consists of long takes with minimal dialogue and subject matter presented with abstract notions of violence at its heart. Silence and suspense were at the core of "Gerry" and also in Van Sant's next offering, "Elephant," which showed a transparent view of the Columbine tragedy that never descends into simplistic "after-school special" cautionary rhetoric.

It is in "Last Days," however, that Van Sant finally explores his contemplations on violence without shedding a drop of blood. Where "Gerry" and "Elephant" use violence as a type of inevitable outcome, "Last Days" chronicles the violence of isolation and self-destruction. Blake (played by the compelling Michael Pitt) performs the aforementioned acts with a curious detachment, like a Poe character wandering the landscape of his eccentricities and obsessions (Roderick Usher comes to mind).

Blake, however, emerges as the most intelligent of his friends, all of whom seem to ignore him (they are at the house to "look after" Blake). There is one series of scenes in the movie that speaks volumes to the effectiveness of Van Sant's minimalist style in that its clarity makes it both heartbreaking and exhilarating. The first portion is a long take of Blake's friends who come home drunk, turn on the "Velvet Underground" and proceed to make out. Scott (Scott Green) goes into the kitchen where Blake is cooking and we see, but do not hear, them talking, and we hope the conversation is humanistic. Later we see the same scene from Blake's perspective, where Scott enters asking for money for a drug- hazed plan that involves traveling to the desert. As we watch, our hearts sink at the inevitability of Blake's destiny.

"Last Days" is affecting because we are never told how to feel and the audience is allowed the space to breathe. Kurt Cobain's life is a well known tragedy that we can approach with preconceived notions, and Van Sant is not interested in telling that story. He is subtly intrigued by the no man's land that Blake occupies and the almost gift of release that Blake deserves after his private torments, in which we are asked never to relate, but only to pity in such a sad context. Joe Ramirez, a Pleasanton local, moonlights full-time in the newspaper industry and part-time as a student, but his sanity has always been at the movies.

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