Review by © Jane Freebury
Clambering through leafy woods and taking a dip in a mountain stream is not what you’d expect a drug addled rock star to be doing, and yet these activities mark the last days of Blake (Michael Pitt) in this film dedicated to the memory of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. While his hangers-on danced and swapped partners, the man himself went into retreat, as dislocated from others as a person could be.
If writer/director Gus Van Sant has been careful to cover himself with a disclaimer in the end titles, he tells the story of Cobain’s last days with considerable felicity to details on record, while offering no answers to the question ‘who killed Kurt Cobain?’ He also hasn’t used the opportunity to delve into a self-destructive mind, just as he avoided a similar opportunity in his film Elephant, when a Columbine-type of massacre in the schoolyard cries out for explanation.
For all that, this is an intriguing exercise. It may be annoying for those who have firm ideas about camera position and framing, about how dialogue should be recorded and what should in the end be revealed, but Last Days belongs to that modernist cinema tradition that refuses to dramatise ‘real’ life and prefers long takes to quick edits.
An old stone mansion with rotting timbers and peeling paint is Blake’s husk of a home, and its owner all hollowed out, old beyond his years, hunched and demented with drugs. Nothing glamourises addiction here, unlike Oliver Stone’s high camp tale about the demise of Jim Morrison, lead singer for The Doors. Blake’s house guests pause but briefly from their fun to feel his pulse, and occasionally complain there’s no food in the house or that they haven’t the money to fly to Utah.
There’s no Nirvana music to be heard, though we do hear grunge and capella voices bookend the film. Church bells, barking dogs and other incidentals can be heard, though little from the man himself, besides barely audible mumblings. The only time his voice comes loud and clear is when the camera dollies back from an open window as Blake sings and plays, alone in the room with his musical instruments.
Random players come and go, bible bashers, Yellow Pages reps, and assorted others, but the central issue will stay with you after the lights come up.
3.5 stars