The Last Detail

I saw The Last Detail tonight at Film Streams (with Jamie). It was a great, entertaining film with wonderful, nuanced performances by all three leads, Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Otis Young. It was a film that was about something without having to be about something, with characters that felt real and with the perfect tonal mix of sarcasm, sincerity, warmth, irony and humor.

I had never seen the film despite loving the other films I have seen by director Hal Ashby, including what is perhaps my favorite film of all time, Harold and Maude. This only cements my respect and love for his work. His stories has such a humanistic feel to them. They can be dark, edgy, unconventional, and sarcastic, but they hold such a love for people...and not a certain kind of person, but the full range of diverse characters that inhabit his films. His films project a kind of curiosity, searching for the person underneath all of the posturing. I also love how he lets scenes play out in a wide shot, letting the actors play off each other and allowing viewers to soak it all in without being forced what to focus on. Ashby doesn't tell us how to feel or try to pin down his characters or drive us through the story. He allows the characters to fully inhabit what feels like a very real world. And we in the audience get the privilege of watching. It also made me think about how that movie would never get made now. I felt invigorated and depressed after watching it. It was exciting to watch it in a theatre and it felt innovative and new and then I had to remind myself that this was a film made over thirty years ago. I felt like I belonged in a class of fifty-year olds grumbling about how they just don't make them like they used to.

For all of you who don't have the privilege of living in Omaha and reading the program notes and comments that Alexander Payne wrote for the films he chose as part of his curated repertory series, here are the more articulate words of Payne about The Last Detail:

"This is a film I now watch about twice a year, and it grows more profound with every viewing. It's one of those rare seemingly simple films at once about one thing and about everything - mostly about the ways human beings can find to love one another despite the roles society imprisons us in, at the same time damning the society that keeps us from loving one another fully. Perhaps it's about none of this. But one way in which it speaks to our current times is that, as in 1973, we are at war. Imagine a film coming out now in which Iraq is barely mentioned, but in which you see soldiers acting like the simple and complex, unique yet recognizable human beings they are-- laughing, crying, whoring, stealing, getting drunk, getting in fights, happy just to blow a little per diem, resigned to a life in the military because other options are lacking. Such a film might be accused of subversiveness, but it would be subversiveness of the most gentle and honest kind. It would reveal that what it criticizes, but is elegant enough not to name, is the true subversion."