The Last Picture Show

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW          A                 
USA  (118 mi)  1971  d:  Peter Bogdanovich

A darkly layered melancholic film adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel which has the true ring of authenticity stamped over every frame of the film, and don’t we wish films could be this refreshingly honest today, particularly the inhibitions to tell the truth about sex?  Featuring a first rate cast, set in a small windblown west Texas town where you either work for the oil industry or you don’t work at all, where there’s next to nothing to do, so the entire town comes out to support the local high school football team every week and then lives or dies with their efforts.  Filmed by Robert Surtees in Black and White, the town looks worn out and lived in before anything happens, where the flatness of the land extends in all directions beyond the horizon, where there is the feeling of no escape from this predicament where the same thing is likely to happen week after week.  Only death brings change, as otherwise humans are tiny specks on the landscape.  Seen through the eyes of high school kids who haven’t a clue what to expect other than a grilled cheeseburger with onions and a coke, the older ones around them, in contrast, have seen it all.  They can look out into an endless patch of land that probably looks no different than it did a hundred years ago and speak of how it is all changing, how time feels faster, how the world is closing in on them making them feel squeezed when there used to be wide open empty spaces.  They’re not really talking about the land, but the person standing there observing how life has changed, how in their youth everything felt possible, they could feel wild and carefree, but nowadays by the time you’re out of high school, your future is set.  There won’t be any other possibilities, and it’s going to be that way for the rest of your life, where only death will change the inevitable.    

Anarene (filmed on location in Wichita Falls and Archer City, Texas) is a small, dusty town of a little over a thousand with a diner and a pool hall that never seem to close, and a single run down movie theater that plays old classic movies where an old woman, the lone employee, struggles to make popcorn.  A clue as to why they’re in this predicament on the verge of closing down is they don’t charge much more than a quarter.  This is an era where radio is still king, where Bob Wills and Hank Williams reign supreme, the late 40’s and early 50’s, before most of the residents in town even own a television set.  Boys work in the oil business or join the army after high school, while girls get married.  That’s just the way it was then.  Somehow, it felt simpler and less complicated, but people faced the same problems then as they do today.  Timothy Bottoms plays Sonny Crawford, a sweet kid with a kind heart, while his best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges) is an oil roughneck with slick, greasy hair and a volatile temper.  Like some kind of Peyton Place soap opera, Duane is going with the richest, prettiest girl in town, Jacy, Cybill Shepherd in her film debut, who is spot on as the spoiled brat with a charming smile who is used to getting whatever she wants by going into her helpless routine, a sex tease who can change the way a man thinks with the batting of an eye.  After a worn out relationship with a girl dies of disinterest, Sonny hasn’t really got anyone except Duane.  Ellen Burstyn as Jacy’s mother is one of the best things in this film, as she married the richest man for miles and is miserable, but she knows Duane is not the right kind of guy for Jacy, which is the only reason she’s with him in the first place.  Clu Gulager plays Abilene, a pool shark who works for Jacy’s father, a man with a love for money and women and is usually mixed up with one or the other.  Ben Johnson from the old John Ford westerns plays Sam, the grizzled old owner of most of the town’s establishments who has the decency to employ Billy (Sam Bottoms, Timothy’s real brother), a mentally challenged young boy who spends his futile time sweeping the dust from the sidewalks and the streets.  Sonny is the only other kid in town who takes a liking to Billy, who worships him because of it.  Eileen Brennan runs the diner with an iron fist, but is a soft touch with a no nonsense veneer, while Cloris Leachman as Ruth Popper is a revelation in this film, playing the eternally sad wife of a high school coach who is rejuvenated when she has a secret affair with Sonny that the entire town somehow knows about.  Every one of these performances is something to rave about, all remarkably contribute to the overall tone of authenticity, as these characters feel lived in like a comfortable pair of old shoes.  Somehow it all works. 

This film is as much about the teenage kids as it is about their all but absent or missing parents, whose empty lives they are about to fill, which is a sad truth about isolated small towns where money remains in the hands of a privileged few and everyone else suffers.  Jacy plays just about every guy in town, each move more calculated and self-centered than the next, but she gets away with it, making everyone else around her miserable.  There are a couple brilliant scenes in this film, the town Christmas party with all of its ramifications, Sonny kisses Ruth for the first time as he’s helping her take out the garbage and Jacy leaves Duane for a rich kids naked pool party where first time initiates must strip naked on the diving board while everybody watches, which Sybill deftly handles, both the first and second times Jacy and Duane have sex in a motel room, both of which are comical, where he’s still talking about it to her as they’re singing the state song of Texas at their graduation ceremony, Sam’s personal confessions to Sonny out at the lake, one of the turning points of the film which won him an Academy Award, or my favorite, when Sonny’s crazy enough to fall for Jacy’s scheme to get married, alerting her parents so they barely get past the state line, only to lose her forever when her father snatches her away for good and Sonny has to ride back to town with Jacy’s sympathetic mother and a flask of bourbon, where for one brief moment in time the balance of adulthood and childhood are perfectly in tune with one another, and finally Sonny’s visit to Ruth at the end which resonates with a kind of fury that’s been missing in this film, where someone has hell to pay, but which turns on a dime and becomes one of the more eloquent transformations of damaged souls crying out in muted pain.  This film is brilliantly written, so much of it understated, perfectly capturing that moment in time when a child is no longer a child anymore, where they have become who they are without even realizing it, still clueless perhaps about themselves and their future, but they are the living embodiment of heartbreak as time has literally begun to pass them by.      

Adult World

ADULT WORLD        C+                 

USA  (97 mi)  2013  d:  Scott Coffey

Another film about the Me Generation, the children of privilege, an entire generation that feels something is owed to them simply because they think they deserve it, not because they’ve done anything to earn it.  Here we see a whiny Emma Roberts as Amy, a fiercely driven young girl (there isn’t an ounce of grown up woman about her) just out of college who is so positive she has the makings of a poet that she invests everything she has, much to her parent’s dismay, in sending off packages of poems to publishers, and then feels disappointed when her parents can’t afford to subsidize her poetry career anymore.  In her eyes, it’s an investment in her future, while her parents think she ought to go out and get a real job.  A girl that sleeps with a poster of Sylvia Plath over her bed, in the opening scene, she replicates Plath’s suicide, plotting out exactly how she would asphyxiate herself from her gas oven, actually going through the motions, yet the tone of the film is an absurd comedy, so right off the bat we realize this is going for demented territory.  The film backtracks one year earlier when she’s in bed with a sleazeball about to have sex with a guy who’s obviously only interested in himself, yet tells her all the things he thinks a girl wants to hear, only to discover a film crew hiding in the closet shooting the whole thing, eventually running out of there in a state of undress and abject humiliation.  A closer inspection reveals Amy is a broken record, a walking advertisement for herself, continually spewing the same mantra of how it’s only a matter of time before she gets published, how she’s so close and on the verge, reminding everyone how her career is about to take off, yet at present, she has nothing to show for it.  Driven to desperation, she relies upon fate, and a Help Wanted sign in a window, where she walks in brimming with confidence and is all smiles until she realizes it’s an adult porn store, running out in a state of panic and hysteria, as if she’d been attacked by a swarm of killer bees.  Apparently, after the unpleasant incident, she still has a near psychotic aversion to sex.       

With her tail between her legs, she sheepishly returns back to the store, discovering it’s run by an old couple still madly in love (Cloris Leachman and John Cullum), where they’re not the least bit ashamed to use the names of sex toys and adult store vernacular in completed sentences, something she finds terrifying and revolting at the same time, so she’s a perfect fit for the store.  The store manager, Evan Peters as Alex (the real life fiancé of Emma Roberts), couldn’t be more friendly and helpful at every turn, yet he’s zeroville in her eyes, as she’s only slumming before the day of the big publishing event.  Roberts appears schooled in the Rosanna Arquette style of comedy, appearing to be one and the same at times, except she’s younger, more girlish, more of an airhead, despite her repeated claims that she was a straight A student, and much more aggravating.  While she’s cute and has a flair for humor, her wretched need to put herself first all the time in a continuous “look at me” syndrome reveals the surface level of superficiality where she operates, never having a reflective moment, which makes the premise of being a writer so absurdly ridiculous.  Yet she perseveres, butting to the front of the line of a book signing of her chosen poet du jour, Rat Billings (John Cusack), something of a washed up has been, a former punk poet who is in town to teach a course at the local university.  While he quickly escapes her outright stalking maneuvers, she finds out where he lives and plants herself on his doorstep, demanding that he read some of her poetry and offer criticism poet to poet.  Her credentials are that she “really feels a lot” and “wants to speak for all the people that suffer.”  Ingratiating herself to him, she’s willing to provide unpaid maid service while calling herself a protégé to her poet mentor.  While nobody really buys any of this, yet she continues to delude herself in a mad rush of youthful exhilaration that she identifies as budding genius. 

Cusack channels Bill Murray in his downbeat sarcasm, underplaying every scene, hoping for a moment of sanity in the enveloping madness, with Alex continually gushing that his work “speaks to an entire generation,” to which he can only answer “No, no it doesn’t.  That doesn’t mean anything.”  While initially he playfully and somewhat scornfully calls her “Suburbia,” by the end he’s describing her as “this generation’s Black Plague,” where he’s forced to  remind her “not everyone is talented.”  In a movie like this, the focus would have to be on a character named Rat, where Cusack does all he can with the role, much of which seems to resemble himself, as if he’s used to fending off the adulation of complete strangers who are positively bonkers in their outright expressed enthusiasm.  The film throws in handfuls of secondary characters, mostly for comic relief, but all of them are mere stops on the road of her meandering journey to success and fame.  While much of this resembles the more impressive work of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) or David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), this film doesn’t belong in the same category, as it’s more of a cheap, comedic imitator, a pretender to something it’s not, which is social relevancy.  Other than the obvious, where the film attempts to comment upon the privileged and the entitled, the film shows little insight, where writers like Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) or Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) have their pulse on middle class disillusionment, using more realistic characters to reflect the unique problems dealing with the emptiness and boredom.  This film has a few laughs and a few comic barbs, but Emma Roberts is such a loathsome, self-centered character that it’s easier to laugh at her rather than identify with her and the culture she represents, suggesting that tonally the director has mostly missed the mark, unless he simply wanted to make a goofy movie that will ultimately be forgettable.