Gus Van Sant's Last Days : Not for the Cobain Fan

The press release for Gus Van Sant’s new film ‘Last Days’ promises a 'fictional meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant but troubled musician'. If meditation involves emptying your head of all thoughts then they’ve hit the spot. Michael Pitt, as semi-comatose Cobain-lite rock star Blake, spends an hour and a half shuffling around his house while mumbling to himself and avoiding his groupies.Van Sant has said that in the work he is "play[ing] with the subconscious elements rather than the conscious ones" - I don't know what this means but Pitt is indeed unconscious for most of the film. The shallow banality of 'Last Days' however is oddly the very force behind what will be for some interesting an cinematic experience, forcing the audience to make all the connections themselves. Blake stumbles through a series of various iconic images that the Nirvana fan would recognise, the sunglasses, the fur coat, the kittens, perhaps an attempt to demonstrate the tragedy of Cobain losing himself in the MTV world that both made him and destroyed him, according to his fans. The film is achingly slow and almost silent, in some respects this is just Van Sant's trademark realism, and the shell of a man that haunts his own cavernous house is symbolic of the distance between the man and his legend. The references to the Nirvana front man are all almost coincidental however, a whimsical collage that makes no attempt to paint a picture of ‘turmoil’ as the makers claim, it gets inside no one's head but the viewers.One has to assume that a Courtney Love lawsuit prevented Van Sant from explicitly making a Kurt Cobain film, and allusions to the Cobain 'image' seem like token additions, but if the real-life rock star was not tacked to Pitt’s wandering waif you get the feeling the film would evaporate off the screen. The significance of ‘Last Days’ entirely rests on your knowledge and interest in the Nirvana front man - judging by the banality of the film, Van Sant finds him fascinating. 'Last Days' is the third in a trilogy that started with 'Gerry', and the similarities with his more recent film ‘Elephant’ are obvious, the rock n roll gunshots, the tragic icons of youth. As in the Columbine film the audience already know the explosive ending (thankfully we are spared Cobain's - maybe wait for the Dvd) but in 'Last Days' this adds no pathos as Blake is effectively dead already.We're caught in the hellish limbo of purgatory with Van Sant, rendering the film strangely vacant despite its potentially volatile subject content and maybe that's Van Sant’s achievement. It’s a film with the complete subjectivity of a heroin-induced daze. In the end the 'naked' Blake escapes towards the heavens from his own body, a clever double exposure but suggesting a metaphysic that's completely at odds with the rest of the film. Ultimately 'Last Days' limps like Pitt through the scenes, a sterile rendering of a potentially powerful subject.