American Cinema's Aesthete of Teenage Despair
How you feel about any of this is your own business. Like "Elephant," "Last Days" offers just the barest skeleton of a narrative. Instead of illuminating the inner workings of an artist at the brink of self-destruction, it is content to show us handsome surfaces.
But at the critical moment, Van Sant averts his eyes and denies us the answers to even the most basic questions. After all the time we spend with Blake eating cereal and watching MTV, we still don't learn how he dies. There is mention of rehab, and certainly Blake and the crew don't look sober, but there are no drugs to be seen, smoked, snorted, or shot up. Suicide by "self-inflicted gun-shot wound," or accidental overdose? We'll never know.
It would be easier to swallow Gus Van Sant's high-falutin' claims about the open structure of his movies and their function as "thought-machines" if what he gave us was more inventive. The food for thought he offers is obvious and stereotypical: the greedy friends, the cut-throat managers, the cheap ironies. A Yellow Pages salesman gives his tired pitch to an exhausted Blake, who promptly nods out. For minutes, the camera stays trained on a TV that shows a glib Boyz II Men video while we know Blake is passed out on the floor. (You see, neither the world of straight business people nor the sanitized product on MTV can understand the tortured mind of the true artist!) Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, playing a record executive, wishes Blake would apologize for being "a rock'n roll cliché." A nice bit of meta-commentary, but unfortunately, it doesn't help to make anything on screen less clichéd.
Van Sant, fascinated by wayward youth at least since "Drugstore Cowboy," appears to be turning himself into American cinema's aesthete of teenage despair. Having stopped making sense long ago, he makes oddly dreamlike, ephemeral fantasies instead. "Last Days" is more art object than movie. Once you accept that Van Sant won't provide enough substance for an interesting story, you can let yourself get carried away by the flow of image and sound, to nowhere in particular. If the sight of Michael Pitt's naked ghost ascending to heaven is worth ten dollars to you, by all means, see "Last Days."
