Last Night (1998)

I’ve often thought that there was a good movie to be made about the end of the world. Not about saving the world, complete with big explosions, but about the lives of real people as they wait for the end. Of course there have been other end of the world movies before with intimate moments, but only Miracle Mile as far as I know, has ever managed to come up with a way of giving the event the emotional impact it deserves.

Don McKellar obviously thought the same as me, so what we have here is a low-budget character-driven piece where special effects don’t dominate. We’ve also got one of those self-consciously clever storylines where characters eventually turn out to be connected or related despite being involved in seemingly random events.

That’s the good bits over with. And I know what question is in your mind here, as it was in mine for almost all the movie: what the hell is happening? The only thing to make this movie any different from any other plotless story about the boring middle classes is that there’s actually the promise of something happening. And ’something’
is about as close as McKellar gets to defining it. We’re told that the world will end at midnight, and that night hasn’t fallen for some time, but that’s about it.

As there weren’t enough things happening to keep my interest on screen, I started to think about this; maybe the earth has stopped turning, leaving Canada mysteriously pointed at the sun? Or has Toronto suddenly become the new North Pole? As gravity seemed intact and there were no huskies around, eventually I decided that both these facts were arbitrary and that McKellar studied drama at school while everyone else did basic physics. Watching this movie just after the millennium celebrations, it occurred to me that if McKellar was so intent on throwing logic out of the window, why didn’t he show us the end of the world in other time zones on TV during the movie? So maybe he didn’t study drama at all.

McKellar appears as the central character, and acts better than he plots. Sandra Oh plays the woman who unfortunately ends up stuck with him and a couple of guns (don’t worry, it’s not that exciting) and Callum Keith Rennie plays McKellar’s friend who’s working his way through the Kama Sutra. Other characters are more or less peripheral, but are cast to appeal to the arthouse and festival crowd. David Cronenberg gives his usual minimum-risk performance as a man from the gas company thanking all his customers on the phone (no, really) and Sarah Polley and Genevieve Bujold turn up as well in calculatedly non-glamorous roles.

For this and other cynical moves, I award McKellar my award for ‘Movie Most Likely to Pick Up an Award at the Toronto Film Festival’. Of course, there is always the odd positive point about a film with a neat central idea, but here the only things to enjoy are the small details of people’s lives. And if that’s all you’re interested in, there’s no need to act like it’s the end of the world.

Rating:
[imdb]0156729[/imdb]

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.