Gus Van Sant's Kurt Cobain-inspired meditation on the final hours of a gifted musician
Actor Michael Pitt portrays the lost figure at the center of director Gus Van Sant’s latest excursion into unknown territory. The film is Last Days, a stark walk through a dying artist’s final moments inspired by the death of one of rock history’s great tragic heroes. Like Van Sant’s most recent films, Gerry and Elephant, an improvised script and freedom from routine cinematic language gives Last Days a hyper-real, oddly poetic flow of events, but Pitt insists it’s not a difficult film. “I know it can seem like a lot is really cryptic,” he said, “but everything is really thought out. There’s a lot of things we did that are there, but not in your face.”
With Last Days, Van Sant expands on the experiments of his last two films, opening his lens wider and letting the silence ring longer. Pitt (pictured above) is Blake, first seen stumbling alone in the wilderness, a caveman in pajamas and sunglasses. Through a random series of events we learn that he’s a rock musician living in a once-elegant mansion gone seedy with neglect, with a small entourage of housemates who incessantly seek him for advice, money and affirmation. Presumably stoned beyond repair, Blake spends Last Days dodging so-called friends, bandmates and other intrusions of the outside world, unable to secure the peace he craves.
There’s no doubt that Blake is intended to recall the late Kurt Cobain; Pitt’s emaciated frame, bedraggled blonde shag, pink sunglasses and general demeanor is sometimes uncanny in its resemblance to the long-mourned star. Van Sant cops to being influenced by the mystery of Cobain’s final hours, but the Last Days story has little in common with the facts of the case, keeping only the essential themes. “With Kurt Cobain, nobody really knew where he was the last couple of days, and what was going on,” Van Sant says. “The inspiration for Last Days was not so much the immediate event, but the ensuing questions of what happened—which was its own media event.”
Pitt submerges so deeply into the swampy depths of Blake’s character that he ends up somewhere beyond acting. His eyes are obscured behind unwashed hair and tinted plastic for most of his screen time, and when he speaks, the words dissolve into inaudible mumbles. Near the end Blake finds an acoustic guitar and is roused from his somnambulism long enough to play a wrenching ballad to himself in the film’s most affecting scene. The song, entitled “Death to Birth,” sure sounds like one of Cobain’s minor-chord folk/blues laments, but it was actually written by Pitt himself, years ago, before he’d even met Gus Van Sant.
That first encounter occurred in 1997 through a mutual friend, casting director Lori Eastside (“I actually went over there to borrow 20 bucks,” says Pitt). Van Sant had already begun drafting an early version of Last Days and thought the young actor might be right for the main character. At this point in the process, all Van Sant had was a list of things that a kid alone in a house might do over the course of a day, but the concept was pushed to the back burner. In the meantime, both kept busy, to say the least. Pitt became a dreamboat via Dawson’s Creek, worked for directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Barbet Schroeder, and stood out as the narcissistic muse in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Van Sant captured Hollywood with Good Will Hunting, confused it with Psycho, apologized with Finding Forrester and then made two of the most uncompromising films of his career.
In 2002, Gerry dropped Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the middle of the desert, then watched them get lost for two and a half hours. Amid gorgeous barren landscapes, this hapless duo wanders in silence broken with improvised bursts of their own private lingo, and eventually the elements overtake them. Patient viewers will find it beautiful, even meditative, and Damon and Affleck turn in uniquely subtle and natural performances. Elephant followed in 2003, Van Sant’s chilling dissection of our national mania for school shootings. A typical day in the life of a suburban high school is interrupted by a well-armed duo of piano-playing, shower-sharing outcasts. Pulling apart each layer of the story until the inevitable, brutal finale, Elephant has the voice of a teenage diarist and presents its violence with a banality that disturbs all the more.
“In these films, the dialogue isn’t leading the story,” says Van Sant. “It’s more ordinary dialogue that a person would hear walking around, and it comes from just observing ordinary life. The subject that people are discussing when you first walk into a room is so random. But we’re very used to that. That randomness is an element in real life [that] I’m trying to introduce because it makes the film life-like. So it doesn’t really matter what the actors are talking about, they’re just talking.”
Last Days benefits from Pitt’s real-world rock ’n’ roll experiences (he currently gigs with New York power trio Pagoda), but Sonic Youth founder and noise-scene booster Thurston Moore is also on board as music consultant and helped ensure the minutiae of Blake’s professional surroundings was accurate. Moore’s partner in rock and life, Kim Gordon, contributes a cameo as a record industry friend and one-woman intervention squad; unfortunately, her familiarity (not to mention a few nervous, fleeting glimpses directly into the lens) puts a dent in the fourth wall. Ricky Jay, best known for David Mamet productions and his own celebrated writings on the history of magic and unusual phenomena, appears as a private investigator on Blake’s trail, but he avoids any real detective work in favor of spinning an arcane tale of a mysterious Chinese magician that comments obliquely on the fate of his wasted quarry.
Other cast members melt into the emulsion with ease and display no strings whatsoever. Asia Argento, Lukas Haas and Scott Green are part of the clueless entourage, and they’re appropriately blank, shuffling through the decrepit mansion with the precarious arrogance of the falsely entitled. Van Sant includes random door-to-door types for verisimilitude, leading to some surreal exchanges with Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Yellow Pages ad salesman. When these people are filling the space in Van Sant’s shots, Last Days achieves the fragile reality that makes it interesting.
Michael Pitt shrugs off the suggestion that Van Sant’s last three films might confuse an audience that knows him best for his bigger multiplex hits. “It’s hard for me to speculate what people will react to and what they won’t,” he says. “I don’t know if a mainstream audience is going to get the chance [to see Last Days]. I can imagine that, given the chance it played in every theatre in Middle America, there’s a definite possibility that people will be surprised. But it’s not necessarily supposed to happen that way.” Falling short of the status quo isn’t anything Pitt worries about; after all—“My definition of ‘mainstream’ is that audience that just eats what’s in front of them, as opposed to seeking it.”
Time and pre-release gossip alone will tell whether Gus Van Sant’s next projects will follow paths similar to this trio of films. He’s one of 20 directors filming a five-minute segment for Paris, je t’aime, a projected experiment in collective filmmaking alongside peers like Jean Luc Godard, the Cohen brothers and Michel Gondry. Van Sant is also slated to direct the film adaptation of bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the book’s twisted, decade-defying romance should prove a worthy challenge. Regardless, Last Days serves as the cap on a trilogy of adventurous films from a brilliant cinema maverick. Pitt breaks it down his own way, when trying to explain the line that flows through all three films; “I think Gerry was the theory, Elephant was learning to manipulate the theory and Last Days is like, I don’t know, mastering the theory. But that’s just my opinion, as a Gus Van Sant fan.”
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