LAST DAYS (2005) **1/2 Does Gus Van Sant's fictitious (poetry is realler than fact, you know) film about the final days do Kurt Cobain justice? What kind of fucking stupid question is that?!! Of course not. It would have to be more beautiful than any film, and more awful and uglier. Gus is so smart he probably never even thought some hack reviewer would even consider some an absurd question (much less a brilliant, insightful writer like myself). But I don't feel bad asking it, because there's a lot of emptiness here, and any quantum scientist will tell you that emptiness doesn't maintain stasis for long. And when there's no wind, impulse or direction…it's as likely to be anything as anything else. Maybe even when those forces are present, entropy you know. The depiction is fine, but Kurt's never in this film; by the first frame he was more doomed than Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking. He was already a ghost looking around, not believing that he was still there when he was aware of it…whether anyone could or could not have saved him is so peripheral to the point as to not be in the picture. Surely Kurt Cobain had met his demons before, knew his demons well, and whatever strategy he adopted…look man, I'm not sure that any of us are really qualified or in any position to judge a film, much less a man. But we keep trying-some of us-because that's part of our interpretation of some aspect of the human condition. It's difficult, too, to say much about Michael Pitt's portrayal: it's good, certainly, but how good? He's someone who isn't there, and he doesn't make it appear any different. He's someone who was one of the great rock stars of all time-had that in him to the end-and he gets that point across (with some assistance with Sonic Youth members, guiding Gus), which couldn't have been easy. Is someone who doesn't know much about Nirvana going to know more after watching this? No, they're just always going to be distracted to the point that figuring much of it out will be very difficult, if they bother. But the cognoscenti, this is for them, then? No, it's not even real, it doesn't pretend to even be guesswork. Anyone with any feel for Kurt already knew this stuff was there, in greater detail than this even. So Gus did a bad job? Hell no ! This was an impossible film to make, and he not only made it but it came out quite well, considering the impossibility. It's not depressing, it's not inspiring, it's not even what Gus thinks happened. It's the closing stanza of a love poem…where the protagonist realizes that the object of his love isn't more…or less than it appeared…just that it carries a lot of unanticipated baggage…and so the love never fails, but it becomes blurs and distorted until it starts melting into everything around it and it all melds into the infinity of just the same. Are you talking about Kurt's love for Rock 'n' Roll or Gus' love for Kurt? Yes.
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