Van Sant's Dark Last Days

Last Days successfully accomplishes all of the goals that Gus Van Sant had in mind when he made it, but that doesn't make it a good film. In fact, as a piece of art, Last Days is almost a complete failure.

Loosely based on the death of Kurt Cobain (both Pitt's character Blake and Kurt are famous blond musicians who kill themselves, but the similarity ends there), the film is about the final days of a troubled man. The audience follows Blake as he wanders through the woods, mutters to himself, interacts with a Yellow Pages worker, has a brief encounter with his entourage of house mates, makes Kraft Dinner and eventually kills himself.

It's the same juxtaposition of mundane everyday activities with a tragic event that made Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning Elephant so powerful, yet when presented on Last Days' smaller canvas it all feels meaningless and tiresome. The life and death of this one man isn't nearly as captivating as the lives of the disparate high school students of Elephant.

If Van Sant's interviews to promote Last Days are any indication, this is exactly what he wanted to do with the film. Abandoning plot and structured dialogue, he wanted to present Blake's waning life as if the audience was spying on a real person. Offering no explanation for and no real warning signs of Blake's suicide, he wanted to make the movie seem as much like real life as possible. What Van Sant seems to have forgotten, though, is that the purpose of art is to transcend life, not copy it. Stories appeal to people because they impose some sort of form and structure on a world that has none.

Last Days might accurately present the real-time life of a person, but it's unsatisfying because it doesn't give us any more than that. It's about as artistically fulfilling as watching someone's webcam. Much like life, there are a few random remarkable moments in Last Days.

There's a short, one-sided conversation between Blake and a record executive (Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon) that beautifully captures the desperate futility involved in a last ditch effort to save a doomed soul. In another scene Blake, hunched over his guitar and looking like the spitting image of Cobain circa Unplugged, plays a guttural howl of a song that perfectly illustrates his inner turmoil.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these moments to let the audience connect to Blake or understand him in any way that would lead to a deeper aesthetic experience. Van Sant might be happy with this result, but it's unlikely that anyone else will.