Common Sense Note
Parents should know that the movie focuses on a musician's depressed final days, and he shoots himself at the end, in a sequence featuring images recalling Kurt Cobain's suicide (based on widely circulated police and press photos). Characters use drugs, drink, smoke, and curse casually and frequently (including the f-word). The movie contains some sexual imagery and references (a girl in her underwear, two young men having sex, two girls dancing, a male character wearing a slip), and sexual slang. A young man urinates into a river (his back to the camera), carries a shotgun through his house, and passes out more than once. He also appears as a ghost, nude, emerging from and ascending from the corpse of his unhappy self.
Families might discuss the film's representation of depression and celebrity. While Blake is surely feeling isolated and despondent, his friends and associates are unable or unwilling to take his depression seriously. How is Blake's melancholy represented in allusive, even poetic, images? How does the film show his rejection of commercial interests, as embodied by other characters, like his manager, bandmates, or hangers-on?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
A mediation on sadness, desire, and lack of direction, LAST DAYS seems almost to stretch out its minutes. Its rhythms are deliberate, its images lyrical (courtesy of superb cinematographer Harris Savides), its mood alternately somber and droll. While the film moves slowly, its subject is strangely urgent, for you know from the start that this is Gus Van's Sant's much anticipated interpretation of Kurt Cobain's suicide. And so you know that the vulnerable, mumbling Blake (played by the androgynous, tender-faced Michael Pitt) will soon be dead. It's only a matter of time.
And yet the film is less depressing than quietly romantic, more emotionally elusive than morally judgmental. For some viewers, this approach to the legendary Cobain will be frustrating, even boring. But it is of a piece with Gus Van Sant's previous two films, Gerry (two young men lost in a desert) and Elephant (inspired by the Columbine High School shootings). That is, its lack of plot and lovely long takes and gently mobile frames reflect Blake's internal state, as he is increasingly dislocated from what appears a generic "rock musician's" existence. As the film opens, he has left a rehab center (his hospital bracelet still on his wrist), and makes his way through the woods to his Pacific Northwest home.
Here his bandmates, Luke (Lukas Haas) and Scott (Scott Green) sleep, party, and impress their girlfriends, Asia (Asia Argento) and Nicole (Nicole Vicius). They try not to have to deal with Blake, who wanders around the house and grounds with his guitar and a shotgun, wearing a series of outfits that recall Cobain's favorites -- a woman's slip, a well-worn striped sweater, faded jeans, flannel shirt, and hooded jacket.
The film works by ellipsis, showing effects of drug use (disorientation) rather than drug use, as Blake descends into himself. Several visitors come by the house, including a Yellow Pages ad salesman, a couple of Mormons, a private investigator (Ricky Jay), and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, whose character identity remains unclear: she worries that Blake is not "free" (perhaps of drugs, perhaps of his demons), and encourages him to call his daughter and to leave the house. But her melancholy face as she leaves underlines that these figures' primary function is to underline Blake's own immobility, his continual circling into himself.
The film includes as well a several music-oriented scenes, where Blake plays guitar or drums and sings (his capacity for creative self-expression almost painfully delicate and desirous), and a repeated use of a Boyz II Men video for "On Bended Knee," that pop ballad all about yearning for lost "perfect love," in which the singers wear their signature argyle sweaters and Bermuda shorts, so clean and pristine that they make Blake look like an alien from another planet.
And this is LAST DAYS' underlying theme, that Blake can't "fit" into the commercial music industry or perpetual demands of those who don't bother to know him. He looks peaceful playing with kittens, and finally, when he lies dead, as his angelic ghost leaves his body. The movie doesn't condone suicide, but represents the release it might have offered to a desperately unhappy young artist.
Families who like this movie might like another rock star story, Almost Famous, or Van Sant's equally mature-themed and meditative films, Elephant, My Own Private Idaho (about a beautiful, narcoleptic teen prostitute), or Drugstore Cowboy (about addicts). You might also want to see Nick Broomfield's provocative, roundabout documentary on Cobain's suicide, Kurt & Courtney.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentBrief nudity, two girls dancing, two boys kissing in bed. |
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ViolenceSuicide by shotgun implied at end, body seen (in photos that recall Cobain's death), but act is not. |
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LanguageVery little dialogue, but some use of curse words, including f-word. |
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Social BehaviorRock musicians and hangers-on are rude, do drugs, and have sex; one character kills himself in the end. |
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CommercialismCocoa Rice Krispies, generic mac and cheese. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoCharacters drink, smoke, and take drugs, though the last occurs mostly off-screen, with effects (stumbling, slurring words) visible. |
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