The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco (1998) is such a strange movie, a movie about how the night can take on a life of its own, and how that which is sexy at twelve midnight is pretty pathetic at twelve noon.  It has writer-director Whit Stillman's signature mock-intellectual dialogue (which served him so well in Metropolitan), and a terrific soundtrack (provided you like disco music), as well as one of the best long party scenes I've ever seen, taking up the first half hour of the movie and imbibing it with a kind of fluid magic.

The characters might as well be carbon copies of those in Metropolitan. One of the actors from that movie, Chris Eigeman, even plays a thinly-veiled variation on his character from that film, and newcomers Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale could be the two main girls from it, except with different hairdos. Sevigny is understated and smart but critical, and Beckinsale embodies a kind of cattiness as her observant and opinionated friend/roommate. Together they inhabit a New York nightclub and it becomes a sort of stage to enact the drama of yuppie romance and friendship.

I liked Last Days for the same reason I loved Metropolitan: The conversations, as in Metropolitan, were generally interesting, and so other-worldly in their quasi-Victorian-ness that they left me somewhat dumbfounded and fascinated. But there was also something a bit false about Last Days of Disco. The dialogue always seems to be teetering between refreshing and ridiculous. It is rather nice to hear people talking in complete sentences and using correct grammar, but when the owner of a nightclub comments on someone's wrong usage of the past perfect tense, something feels disingenuous.

Then again, director Stillman often seems like he's toying with his characters' intelligence in the first place. He lets them get puffed up on their own sophisticatedness and then watches them become caricatures, although he doesn't completely dehumanize them. It's a lot more subtle that that. They're somewhere between soap opera and sitcom, book smart and street smart, bold and terrified. And all of these contradictions are masked by a veneer of success and confidence that we the audience can generally see through. 

The real problem with Last Days is that everything about the film feels too familiar, as if Stillman were simply unable to do anything but recycle old ideas. I think it's very likely he wanted to explore the same ideas in a slightly different context. He's too interested in these types of people--educated, privileged upper-class sophisticates--not to use them in his films. This at least makes them interesting for us, up to a point, but their intelligence often morphs into myopia, and this turns them into shallow, unappealing characters toward the end of the film.

And then of course, the fact that at some point this film is acknowledging a kind of reverence for the disco era is laughable, especially at the end when passengers on the subway begin dancing to "Love Train." Was that really such a great way to end a movie that's so self-consciously clever? It's difficult to know if the film is trying to be hip, ironic, or subversive. I think perhaps it's a combination of all three. The cast includes a lot of promising young actors including Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals, Matt Ross, Tara Subkoff, and David Thornton. 114 min. ★★½

Arbitrage

More terrifying than King Kong, Jaws, or the apocalypse, the Corporation has become the cinema villain/monster par excellence. This is apropos in our current age of corporate executives turning money into more money in mere seconds, and wiping out the life savings of entire companies with fraudulent business practices. Arbitrage, like last year's superior Margin Call, examines a billionaire (Richard Gere) whose irresponsible, arrogant, greedy behavior threatens his company and all who work for it. But he's nothing if not a sly businessman, so when his hedge fund is threatened with exposure, he decides to sell his massive company in time to avoid public embarrassment or any financial ruin. Gere is perfectly suited to this role: he's got the look of a wearied executive down, spinning all kinds of falsities about working for his family, when it's really his own success, the addiction he has to making more money, that drives him.

When his hush-hush lover, a failed French artist, dies in a car accident in the middle of the night because Gere fell asleep at the wheel, he's finally faced with a genuinely sticky situation, and Arbitrage is about how he tires to get himself out from under it. It's not a brilliant movie, but there's something brilliantly corrupt that it shows us about human beings, about American culture, about our entire value system.

What's so refreshing about Arbitrage is that it doesn't go for the obvious, but the inevitable. The people in this world are the recipients of a moral decay that's far more glamorous than the things we see on the news--the horrific shootings and the drug trafficking and the human trafficking, that we all deplore with such moral certitude. The moral decay of Arbitrage is one where negotiations extend beyond the conference room and into the bedroom, where money drives every motivation, and even marriage runs on the concept of mutual interests. There's a decidedly Victorian sense of patriarchal faux-benevolence that keeps all the players in place. The finale is so wonderfully fitting that it makes up for the fact that at times Arbitrage feels like an episode of Law and Order mixed with Wall Street. It's not a great movie, but a pretty good one, and a frighteningly apt comment on human character.

The supporting cast includes Susan Sarandon (who doesn't get to shine the way I wanted her to, until near the end) as Gere's wife, Tim Roth as a detective, Brit Marling as Gere's daughter, an executive herself who still sees the business world as a place inhabited by honest people with clean motives, Nate Parker (who delivers the film's most sympathetic performance) as a down-on-his-luck kid (whose father once worked for Gere) who comes to Gere's rescue, Laetitia Casta as Gere's girl-on-the-side, Stuart Margolin, Chris Eigeman, Graydon Carter, and Bruce Altman. Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki. 105 min. ★★★

Metropolitan

In Metropolitan (1990), Tom Townsend, who's just finished his first semester at Princeton, unexpectedly enters into the inner-circle of a group of upper-class New York college students during debutante season. It's like a preppie Breakfast Club only everyone's too intellectual to wallow in self-pity. Most of the action takes place in one of the adolescent's homes, where the group stays up late into the night drinking, talking, and occasionally playing Bridge or some other game. They're socialites in training. It would be pretentious if it wasn't so funny and so earnest.

The writer-director Whit Stillman pulls off something impressive: he creates a believable, sympathetic, even inviting, world comprised of somewhat stuck-up, educated young people who are endearing in spite of themselves. They talk about philosophy and economics but they also gossip, and they're acutely aware of their social world. They're also naive, but in their precocious over-analyzing they manage to find at least some degree of acceptance that, though they think they know everything, they may also be wrong about some things.

The performances by the fresh-faced cast are mostly good. This is an extremely talky movie, one that almost plays like a filmed stage production. It's a movie about ideas and social relationships, and while Stillman isn't totally ignorant of or indifferent to the cinematic elements of his movie, he's far more attuned to the dialogic aspects. We're immersed in this inner-circle like a fly on the wall as the social dramas play out: the scathing remarks, the incisive criticisms, the hopeful longings for romance and success, the cynical worries of the future: it's all wrapped up in a peculiar fabric of conversation. You're never even sure how much these people like each other.

At times they seem to have cut each other to pieces, and then moments later it's as though nothing's happened, and they're chasing after some other thread of conversation. It's a fascinating movie; not perfect, but never boring, and totally unpredictable. I was charmed by it in a way I haven't been in a long time.

The cast includes: Edward Clements as Tom, the newcomer who has a lot of "big" ideas about economics, culture, and philosophy, but is also still a little gauche when it comes to girls; Carolyn Farina as Audrey, the bookish girl who's never really been in love before; Chris Eigeman (a stand-out performance), as Nick, the guy who pisses everyone off with his cynical honesty and harsh criticisms of one and all, but is also somehow likable in spite of himself; Taylor Nichols (who made me think of Crispin Glover) as Charlie, the nerdy ideologue who's in love with Audrey but can't get up the nerve to tell her, and resents Tom because Audrey has a crush on him; and Allison Parisi (who, with her raven-like hair and confident, imposing features resembles a young Kirstie Alley), the most "grown-up" acting of the girls; she exudes maternal qualities but is indifferent toward the other girls at the same time. Also starring: Isabel Gillies, Bryan Leder, Will Kempe, and Ellia Thompson. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 98 min. ★★★½