It’s tempting to call Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” a silent movie. But the indie director’s film – dedicated to grunge prince Kurt Cobain – has sound. Plenty of it. What this endpiece to a masterful trilogy doesn’t have is lots of talk.
Thanks to longtime collaborator Leslie Shatz, this virtuosic elegy about a rocker’s slow slide is marked by languid, willful lulls. When sounds punctuate images, they are often more discordant than resonant, or they seem all too real. Doors creak in the woods. Water sloshes while the musician, named Blake, makes his way through a massive house, rifle in his hand. Or a dog howls. Even when the rocker seems alone in the quietest woods, a jet roars overhead.
With his latest effort to make an art film that captures real life but isn’t a documentary, Van Sant reminds us how much we rely on dialogue in movies and how heavily we lean on conversation to reveal character.
He does this by stripping his film of most of those tools.
“Last Days” continues Van Sant’s dogged pursuit of mysteries that the media hints at but never really engages.
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Taking his cues from headlines about death, the writer-director has rushed headlong toward art: In “Gerry,” two guys are lost in the wilderness and only one returns; in “Elephant,” there’s a high school shooting; and in “Last Days,” the death of a tormented rocker.
Call it media impressionism.
But don’t go to “Last Days” expecting a biopic of the Nirvana frontman who committed suicide in 1994.
If you seek closure, Van Sant will challenge, disappoint, even infuriate. The Cobain that actor Michael Pitt channels is a soul who already has crossed over.
Can a movie mourn but not move?
“Last Days” opens with a black screen and a rich ecclesiastical chorus. Then we see a figure. Blake mutters to himself as he tramps through some woods. He takes a dip in a river. Later he builds a fire, sparks swirling like fireflies.
This could be a portrait of creative solitude. But Blake’s breathless babbling, punctuated by bouts of muteness, suggest it’s more a fugue state of loneliness.
Why so lonely? Following Blake back to his house, we get an answer.
In the vast stone house he shares with friends who have become nothing more than hangers-on, Blake moves from room to room. On only a handful of occasions does he share space with another human being. His housemates steer clear. Just as often, he avoids contact: never picking up the phone, dodging a friend and a private investigator, escaping to the little carriage house where he’ll depart this mortal coil.
If a nodding rock star crumples to the floor in slow motion to the strains of Boyz II Men on a widescreen TV, will anyone hear him, let alone see him?
Eventually one housemate does. She finds him, props him up and leaves. So much for an intervention.
“Last Days” does provide a couple of moments of levity. The first comes when a black telephone directory ad salesman visits the house. Shortly after, twin Mormon elders stop by. The cultural collisions blow air into the hermetically sealed house. But it’s hard to say these two scenes don’t cheapen the film’s insights.
Van Sant offers us better refuge than these gags. He and cinematographer Harris Savides have created a sanctuary in images. Why Savides’ signature tracking shots haven’t grown tiresome is its own mystery. Maybe it’s because they’re such fluid gestures of tender observation. When the camera floats behind Blake, watching his twisted gait, it tweaks a soft spot. He’s the walking wounded.
He is also a passive-aggressive jerk. When a record company exec (Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon) shows up at the house, she asks if he has talked to his daughter. “Do you say, I’m sorry I’m a rock ‘n’ roll cliché?” The cliché doesn’t have an answer.
“Success is subjective,” Blake told the salesman earlier.
In putting the onus for meaning on viewers, Van Sant has pinned the film’s success to our subjectivity. It might not guarantee fondness. Yet what an extraordinary collaboration it makes.
“Last Days”
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R for language and some sexual content|1 hour, 37 minutes|DRAMA|written and directed by Gus Van Sant; photography by Harris Savides; starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Nicole Vicius, Ricky Jay |Opens today at the Mayan.
