Gus Van Sant takes the template of his last film, 2003's Elephant, and applies it to the death of Kurt Cobain in his new Last Days (which had its local screening at this year's CineVegas Film Festival). Like Elephant, Last Days uses incredibly long takes, often static shots, long stretches with no dialogue, a non-linear story structure and an emphasis on the mind-numbingly mundane to trace the events leading up to a famous tragedy. In Elephant, it was the shootings at Columbine High School. In Last Days, it's Cobain's suicide. Each film is a fictionalized account of its subject, but it's clear that Van Sant wants to use his elliptical, minimalist style to say something about the significant events of our time.
The problem with Last Days—and to a lesser extent, Elephant—is that Van Sant's primary mode of saying something is saying nothing. Last Days follows rock star Blake (Michael Pitt), a Cobain stand-in who spends a few days (it's not clear exactly how many) puttering around his Seattle estate in a stupor, wandering through the woods behind his property mumbling to himself, lying half-conscious on floors, occasionally playing a bit of music or talking to the freeloading friends staying with him. Pitt chokes out only a handful of lines that aren't mumbles in the entire film, and his fair-weather friends are little more than sketches of the same kind of hanger-on you see in every rock 'n' roll movie.
Like Elephant, Last Days is shot in a square-aspect ratio that's the shape of a TV screen, not a movie screen, which gives it a certain claustrophobic feel. Cinematographer Harris Savides, who is rapidly becoming one of the best in his field—he shot both Elephant and Van Sant's previous film, Gerry, as well as Jonathan Glazer's Birth and David Fincher's The Game—not only uses the odd screen size to great effect, but also creates some of the most stunning images set to film this year, and gives Van Sant's long, lingering, sometimes uncomfortable takes a reason for existing. Savides shoots both the beautiful old house and the surrounding woods with vibrant colors and a painterly eye; with its penchant for quiet, Last Days might almost work better as a silent film.
The look isn't enough, though, to excuse Van Sant's disregard for character development, plot and dialogue. In the end, it isn't necessary to show 90 minutes of nothing happening to get across the idea that tragedy usually arises out of the mundane.