Review: Last Days

Set in Seattle, Michael Pitt stars as a defeated-looking Kurt Cobain stand-in, wandering aimlessly and zombielike around his mansion in the last few days of his seemingly miserable life. A few hangers-on and random people turn up every now and then like musician Lukas Haas, and Yellow Pages salesman Thadeus A. Thomas, but Pitt reacts to them in a passive, barely observant manner. He might be trying to avoid them by staying at the opposite end of the house, but that would seem to indicate effort. You have to be awake to do that, and Pitt seems at the very most somnambulant. Magician Ricky Jay turns up as a detective who seems more interested in telling anecdotes than anything else. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (who was an acquaintance of Cobain) plays Pitt’s mother. Asia Argento plays a woman named Asia ( presumably cast because...well, she’s Dario Argento’s daughter).

 

After the pointless debacle that was the shot-for-shot colour remake of “Psycho”, you’d think writer-director Gus Van Sant (“Drugstore Cowboy”, “My Own Private Idaho”, “Good Will Hunting”) would’ve learnt his lesson about ego-trip cinematic experiments. This deadeningly dull, hopelessly uninteresting and pointless 2005 excursion into so-called ‘minimalism’ would suggest that Mr. Van Sant ain’t that bright.

 

Like with the “Psycho” remake, the result is also genuinely offensive. Some will say that this is not Van Sant’s idea of the final days in the life of Kurt Cobain, because the character here goes by a different name and there are a few other minor differences. Horse shit. It’s Cobain. Van Sant knows it, and you and I know it. So if you’re gonna tackle a subject like this, a guy who was not only the voice of a generation (with all the positives and negatives you could throw at that statement well in mind), you better do it right, Gus. A minimalist treatment is the absolute wrong way to go about it. Mr. Van Sant might plead innocence and suggest that this isn’t Cobain, but the fact there are so many similarities (Michael Pitt doesn’t naturally look like Cobain, he’s made to look like him), and the fact that audience are always going to be curious about Cobain’s state of mind at the time of his death, will ultimately have the audience demanding answers. Van Sant doesn’t give us any. In fact, he doesn’t give us a damn thing. This isn’t even a movie, as far as I’m concerned. It certainly has no real narrative, nor are there any real significant events or happenings in the film. It’s just 90 minutes of Michael Pitt (normally a pretty good actor, encouraged to underplay into invisibility), often slightly out of focus and hidden behind messy hair, moping around his house and mumbling mostly under his breath. Occasionally other people turn up, but we get no real insight of who they are either, let alone much of their relationship to the Cobain facsimile (Van Sant isn’t suggesting that Dave Grohl is bisexual, is he? I think Dave might find that to be a surprise to him). Van Sant even lets famed magician Ricky Jay turn up for a completely pointless, extraneous, and superfluous monologue that whilst the only amusing thing in the film, stops it dead at the same time. Worse still, the man who plays the Yellow Pages salesman in the film (Thadeus A. Thomas) was actually the real deal. He just walked on set one day wanting to sell his books, and Van Sant liked the guy enough to let him do it in the film. Why? ‘Coz Van Sant can.

 

This...this is nothing. There’s nothing going on here at all. Well-shot, though, I guess. But if you’re looking for the Kurt Cobain story, you won’t find it here. If you’re looking for a Kurt Cobain-like story, you won’t get that either. You won’t get any story at all. Or anything else, really. I’d say that some random stuff happens for 90 minutes, but I can’t even bring myself to suggest that stuff even happens. Stuff suggests something interesting to at least someone, this is unlikely to entertain anyone. The fact that I’ve heard several critics wildly praise this boggles my mind. I don’t even know what this is. It’s certainly not the story of why Kurt Cobain killed himself, because even if this were Cobain’s story, whatever has happened to make him the way he is, has already happened before the film starts. So what we’re seeing is the whole lotta nothing that happens before he finally ends it all. Something tells me that there was more going on in Cobain’s life and state of mind in this last days than what Gus Van Sant gives us in these last days. And even if there wasn’t, and that were Van Sant’s point, a film needs to give us something anyway, otherwise you’re watching the equivalent of a blank screen. This isn’t minimalist, it’s near absolute zero. If you see a masterpiece in this piece of shit, good for you. I hated every interminable, inert second of it.

 

Although I’m a fan of Nirvana and recognise that they and Cobain were indeed the voice of my generation, I’m not necessarily sure that’s a good thing given what they and he really represented. But if this was even meant to be like Kurt Cobain’s last days, Cobain (whatever your feelings are about him and his legacy) deserved a much better depiction than what we get in this. Awful and worthless, and frankly offensive.

 

Rating: D-