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The Last Time I Committed Suicide
*1/2
Cinema
Releases - June 12,
1998
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Written and directed by Steven Kay; based on a letter by Neal
Cassidy. Starring Thomas Jane, Keanu Reeves, Adrien Brody, Gretchen Mol,
Claire Forlani, John Doe.
"A man's life is merely a collection of events,
building one upon the other. When all the events are tallied; the triumphs;
the failures; the mistakes; their sum makes up the man. These are but a few
events in the life of 'Superman'."
Do any of my readers have any idea how this relates
to Steven Kay's "The Last Time I Committed Suicide", or even
the life of Neal Cassidy? I guess it's the Superman reference that confuses
me most, but the above passage still sounds rather stupid, and is a most
off-putting way to begin a film.
It is a loose, confusing collection of stories,
I think, not that I could pass a test on what it's about. It covers different
aspects of Cassidy's life from when he was about twenty. Cassidy (Thomas
Jane) was one of the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s, and one of his
letters inspired the John Kerouac novel "On the Road" as well as this movie.
I guess that the writer-director of "Last Time I Committed Suicide", Stephen
Kay, is a big fan, and for other big fans, or even people who know more about
this subject and these people than myself, maybe his film will work. For
my single self, however, I was hardly able to follow it at all. The film
seems to set itself up with many different strands and relationships, but
meanders in and out of them without shape, point or focus. At one point I
got a grasp of what the film was trying to tell us about Neal and "Cherry
Mary"(Gretchen Mol), but then it left it and again started to concentrate
on characters who I wasn't able to identify.
The lack of being able to identify certain characters
has an obvious explanation, and it is that all the female characters sound
the same, look the same (except for their hair colours) and don't have very
distinct personalities. This is incredibly irritating, especially since I
did want to like the movie. After all, it has a talented cast,
including Keanu Reeves, who has an interesting role as a weird friend of
Neal's. It also has a nice feel to it, with a terrific jazz soundtrack. The
dialogue often goes back and forth deliciously, and the film has one of the
funniest lines I've ever heard in a movie... "Swim over to the bar and rescue
me an ale from the evil beerkeep!"
But, oh, God, this is such a hard movie
to like! Even if the "Cherry Mary" subplot had followed through into a coherent
narrative, what could make up for the bewildering first third of the film?
It starts with Neal visiting a lady in hospital, who may or may not have
attempted suicide, but to be honest I couldn't tell. At this point I was
informed that I was going to have to suffer a film in which it was unclear
whether anything was a flashback, a flashback within a flashback, a flash-forward
or another narrative device. When this movie comes out, I may be tempted
to go peek at a paying audience, and see if they are, as I expect they will
be, all staring open-mouthed with disbelief, like the "Springtime For Hitler"
audience in "The Producers".
If I didn't make it clear before, let me do so
now. Fans or students of the Beat Generation's lives or work, who know about
this subject, will probably find it interesting. It felt, to me, like there
were moments meaningless to me that may be significant to others. I imagine
that those who approved Kay's script were such people, and so nobody told
him that his script was confusing, and so obviously personal that it's
unintelligible to others. That's how it felt to me, that in writing "The
Last Time I Committed Suicide" Kay needed to get out of his system a bunch
of images that kept playing around in his head. After all, it's obviously
an adaptation, and one that was not written with much consideration for the
audience. Well, he had every right to write it, but why oh why did he have
to go ahead and get it made?
COPYRIGHT©
1998 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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