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| Last Picture Show, The |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 118 |
| Public Rating: 7.73 (15 votes) |
Director: Peter Bogdanovich |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1971 |
| Writer(s): Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich |
| Reviewed by: Vadim Rizov |
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There's nothing lyrical about this black-and-white portrait of decay, depression and, above all, joyless mechanical coupling in a small Texas town, title excepted. Peter Bogdanovich may have, as he once confessed, "more affinity for past...Since I am more interested in it, it comes easier for me", but there's nothing fond about this acutely observed, consciously depressing black-and-white dirge. There's humor, but it's acerbic and mostly despairing. Apparently, McMurtry informed Bogdanovich exactly how depressing it is to live in a dying small town, and Bogdanovich decided to produce this effect upon an audience in a mere two hours. But it feels too forced: the young Bogdanovich had no basis to be so unrelievadly bleak, and you can tell.
In retrospect, another one of Bogdanovich's choices comes out wrong (or maybe it's just a tribute to the perceptiveness of his casting director): his deliberately chosen unknowns became famous, attaching a novelty factor to this film, allowing one to see, among other things, young Jeff Bridges consuming beer at a Lebowski-like rate, and Cybill Shepherd getting naked in her film debut. They're the young 'uns of a dusty Texas city, and, as the film opens, the typically Texan distraction of football has worn off: as Bridges and best bud Tim Bottoms wander the street in the opening, all the locals chide their failure to pass in the previous night's football game, but the duo couldn't care less. The rest of the picture chronicles their relentless downward spiral as they exhaust all their town has to offer them, ending in the military departure of one and the resignation to a pathetic "love" affair in the other. Violence and sex: that's all they have (evidently Bogdanovich predated Fight Club by a few years), and both are joyless.
Summarized boldly, it plays like one of those grim kitchen-sink realist pictures that wants to depress the shit out of you (e.g. Ratcatcher): he loses his girlfriend, and then he has joyless sex, and then he loses his best bud, and then...sob...the movie theater closes, etc. It doesn't get any better in the viewing, especially as backed by a relentless soundtrack of yodeling country-music fools and edited to get from one moment to another without pause. The results are effective, no doubt, but they're too easy to achieve, relentlessly zeroing in on one town and never leaving for another perspective. Well, all but one perspective: that of the old-fashioned Western heroes (including Ben Johnson as a old-school courtly gentleman/father figure) who survive to provide an ironic contrast between the modern inhabitants of Texas frontier towns who had simple tasks to accomplish, and their degenerate leftovers, who have nothing to do and nowhere to go. In spite of the fairness of Bogdanovich's attack, it's an equally aimless film, whose central thesis is one the world never doubted. The effect is ultimately exhausting rather than depressing.
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