Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.
Twenty years down the pike, MIRACLE MILE is history. That's fitting, as the movie is about history, about where we came from and about where we're going. Fuck THE LION KING - this is the real Circle of Life. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. With a nod to film noir, the movie attends the poor fortune of regular guy Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) when he answers a payphone outside of a Fairfax greasy spoon (actually, the same Johnies as seen in RESERVOIR DOGS) and learns that thermonuclear war is imminent. (Given this as an inciting incident, SORRY WRONG NUMBER would have made for a sweetly ironic title but the movie is closer kin to D.O.A.) While the ripple effect of shock and awe sends rings of Los Angeles night owls and early risers into their respective exit strategies, Harry scrambles to collect the love of his life (Mare Winningham), whom he has unwittingly stood up (due to a Rube Goldberg-style power failure) and must now locate in the rabbit's warren of Park LaBrea, awaken from slumber and guide to safety in whatever time remains.
MIRACLE MILE sits comfortably amongst a small body of films made in L.A. during the 1980s that have an edge that seems a pingback to the experimental, indulgent days of the New Hollywood but with a more candied, storybook color palette regardless of whether the subject matter is fantastical. Jim McBride's BREATHLESS (1983), James Cameron's THE TERMINATOR (1984), Bobby Roth's HEARTBREAKERS (1985), John Landis' INTO THE NIGHT (1985), James Bridges' MIKE'S MURDER (1985), Charles Band's TRANCERS (1988), Robert Dornhelm's ECHO PARK (1986) and Wayne Wang's SLAM DANCE (1987) - regardless of their perceived successes or failings as complete works of art - all exhibit an understanding of the quality of desert light refracted off the media of humanity and illustrative of the full range of human emotions. Populated by wildly disparate characters connected to one another by skeins of circumstance, these films are all about, to some degree, obsession and attraction and pursuit and destruction - the circle of life. The story goes that MIRACLE MILE was written to be a segment in Warners' TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983) but coming as it does five years past that ill-conceived and tragic grab-bag, the film nicely caps a decade that - however much it may be tagged a cooldown for the intense workout that was the 1970s - certainly had its own ideas about destiny and fate.
Twenty years post-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1988), MIRACLE MILE sucker punched moviegoers not expecting another out-of-nowhere writer-director to take out his entire dramatis personae with such an unblinking quality of un-mercy. This movie takes no prisoners, and yet there is heartache at these deaths, from the offscreen demise of catalyst Chip (the voice of Raphael Sbarge, doing a favor) to the shock immolation deaths of two LAPD uniforms (along with a post-STRAIGHT TIME/pre-RESERVOIR DOGS Eddie Bunker) to the poignant bleed-out of brother and sister act Mykelti Williamson and Kelly Jo Minter. One even feels a measure of sympathy for the hateful Kurt Fuller as he suffers a KISS ME DEADLY (1955)-style flash burn in the face of a missile strike (his eyes liquefying in their orbits like Alka Seltzer tablets) but our hearts belong to Edwards and Winningham's Adam and Eve on a raft as they wait for love to lift them up where they belong.
Although both performers had juggled roles on screens big (TOP GUN for him, ST. ELMO'S FIRE for her) and small (Edwards was part of the ensemble of CALL TO GLORY, while Winningham held her own as the star of the 1981 telefilm FREEDOM, singing songs by Janis Ian), MIRACLE MILE marked a milestone in the careers of both performers, separating their Promising Newcomer days from their subsequent work as character actors. Winningham even had a four episode arc during Edwards' long tenure as sensitive sawbones Mark Greene on NBC's ER in 1998. Yet while it has a certain amount of currency among cult film fans, MIRACLE MILE remains sadly forgotten by the general population two decades hence. Twenty-somethings exposed to the film now might look at it as an old movie, a relic like the RKO logo that flashes on Edwards' black-and-white TV. Revisiting it recently, I was struck by how well it has held up, even given some unfortunate workout fashions and the absence of such long-standing Hollywood landmarks as the Pan Pacific Auditorium (destroyed by fire in 1989) and John Agar, in his best late life cameo as Winningham's wirey gramps.
The final frames of MIRACLE MILE reminded me of the last reel of Don Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), as hero and heroine run hand and hand through the hurlyburly that is the end of days. Yet while Siegel's film has the ostensibly more upbeat ending, his protagonist loses the girl to the alien throng - the world survives but love dies. Though our worst fears are confirmed by the apocalyptic conclusion of MIRACLE MILE, love survives the blast, refracted in the interface of the mutually exclusive media of mankind and mushroom cloud to become something else entirely - something elemental and more concentrated, discernible only to future generations who, in their desire to understand the past as a blueprint for the future, will somehow know where to dig.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
A certain quality of failing light
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18 Arbogasps:
Miracle Mile is a terrific film and I can't help wondering what else DeJarnatt might have done had he not vanished into the oubliette of episodic TV.
Nice call on the similarities to Terminator and Into The Night. I'd only really considered its resemblance to the former - both featuring supporting turns from Earl Boen and presenting Reagan era LA as a modern labyrinth.
I saw this film at a small theater in Boulder Colorado when it first came out and was instantly taken with it. I thought it was a fantastic movie and was pretty much shocked at the film's ending (I guess I was hoping for some kind of miracle).
Here's a bizarre bit of trivia concerning Miracle Mile; Near the end of the film, Anthony Edwards approaches a man in a sort of super-hero costume assuming this is the guy from the gym who is going to fly him and his girl away to safety. When the man turns around, it turns out to be someone else.
That uncredited someone was 80's gay porn star, Steve Hammond.
Love this flick... one of damned few that I've seen that as the end credits started to roll, the audience just sat there...
... mute...
... motionless. As if they expected narrative to pick back up and reassure them.
It's also the film I most love to drop on friends and tell them to watch it without looking up what it's about. A huge part of the frisson comes from not knowing whether Warshello has been apocalyptically punk'd, and that he -- and only he -- may be responsible for the burn, Hollywood, burn.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
A few notes:
1. So help me, the first time I ever came to L.A. as an adult, I went looking for Johnie's, which was still open then. I remember being very let down that it wasn't really open late at night.
2. I never really watched it, but I think that DeJarnatt directed a number of ERs years ago. Makes me wonder if he was there when Winningham turned up.
3. While I saw it in a theater during opening weekend and loved it the occasion was uneventful. I did, however, know somebody who said that after their screening they saw a number of people, horrified by what they had just been through, going to the theater manager to complain. I wish I'd been there for that.
4. Back in 2001 the film was shown at LACMA, the most appropriate place to see it, and DeJarnatt was there for a Q&A after the film. There was definitely a feeling of people asking questions they'd always wanted to ask--mine was about the oddity of the film opening with narration as if the whole thing was a flashback. He seemed genuinely sheepish about this and said that the first ten minutes were probably the only thing about the film he would tinker with, to make it clear that Edwards was only flashing back to having met Winningham earlier that day. When everyone left the museum we walked out to Wilshire, looked up at the Mutual Benefit Life Building (or whatever it was called then) and laughed at the strangeness of it all.
I wish I could watch it again right now.
Well despite my fascination with all things nuclear I somehow missed this one when it came out. I must IMMEDIATELY watch it.
Miracle Mile is one of the best films of the 1980s. Its great virtue is maintaining its sense of humor all the way through, which leaves you room to question almost to the end how it will end.
Was I the only one to note an echo of it in CLOVERFIELD?
This is a terrific write-up of a film that I have trouble getting behind 100% for reasons that, if I were to go into them, would probably come off as nit-picks, or as the thoughts of someone determined to not see the forest for the trees. So I won't bother, although deep down I feel my gripes are legitimate. Living like this makes a man lonely.
Even so, as it happens I watched this film for the first time in many years on cable just a few months ago, and one thing I can't argue with is that when the movie works, it works, and it does hold up quite well. Zodiac made me a genuine no-kidding fan of Edwards, and it was great seeing him in something like this, a film that gives him room to show what he has. The fact that it's in a movie that so few people saw is irrelevant.
I wish I'd seen Miracle Mile completely cold, but the first time I saw it was on VHS when I was a teenager, and the box didn't exactly keep its cards close to its vest. And that's a terrible shame, because clearly the film was structured for people who just walked in off the street to see a film they knew nothing about. I don't think movies can be made with that audience in mind anymore and expect the effect to last more than a day.
Word verification: ragmen(!)
Mik: I can't help wondering what else DeJarnatt might have done had he not vanished into the oubliette of episodic TV.
First off, full marks for you for sneaking in the word "oubliette" into the conversation. You honor and elevate us. And yes, it's sad to see DeJarnatt connected to The Vaginal Warts of Lizzie McGuire or whatever that show is called. Hey, I'm glad he's working but...
Craig: I'm still waiting for the end of Miracle Mile to reassure me! But the older I get and the less obsessed I am with my own immortality, the more that ending does reassure me, in a way.
Peter Peel: Thanks for the kind words and those recollections. I'm sure all of us (well, except that nay-sayer Bill) wish we had been with you in the audience that night in 2001. And DeJarnatt did direct some episodes of ER but as I recollect it was in the mid-90s, with Edwards on the show but before Winningham turned up.
No one has yet mentioned the presence in the film of SAG President Alan Rosenberg, who seems to be on so many shit lists these days.
Lapper: Yeah, queue this up and report your findings. Maybe a Big Bomb Blog-a-thon is in order!
Samuel: No, you are not alone in detecting the fallout of Miracle Mile in Cloverfield - even if for nothing more than the end. I remember wanting to note the seeming influence of the earlier film on the later one but I just didn't want to shoe-horn in another film reference, because my thoughts about Cloverfield didn't revolve around it as a hodgepodge of film references but rather how it connected (in my mind, anyway) to an unexpected literary reference. See my review on the sidebar if you're interested.
Bill: I'm sure we all have those movies that we wish we could like but just can't help but nitpick to death. I certainly felt that way about the Spanish [REC], which everybody and his blogging brother loved but which left me cold and in a mood to find fault.
I don't actually dislike the film. There's a lot in there that I actually think is pretty dang good. No, my objections are less of a cinematic nature, and more to do with, er, politics. I know, I know, I'm making too much of a couple of a few lines of dialogue (or am I??)...but let's just for instance say that I take issue with the names of the people chosen to whisk to safety so that society could be rebuilt, among one or two other things.
But as a film, and as a story, I actually do kind of admire Miracle Mile.
It seemed to me that that list (brainstormed off the top of sanitation worker Rosenberg's head) is supposed to be somewhat mocking of reflexively left-leaning thinking - the names of those personalities suggested to be whisked to safety are all kind of feel-good, do-gooders: "Linus Pauling, Jane (Fonda) and Tom (Hayden), Harry Belafonte, Danny Berrigan and his brother (Philip), Bobby Seale, Dick Gregory..." It always struck me as richly satiric that someone would have wound up with such a trickle down liberality that he'd think MENSA could rebuild a dead world.
Well, IF that was satire, then kudos, because it was dead-on. But it didn't really play that way for me. I mean, it sets itself up as a kind of paranoid lefty thriller in the first place, so to then quietly satire the left like that seems like an odd choice to me. But it's entirely possible that I'm not giving DeJarnatt enough credit on that front. Either way, when the sanitation worker starts rattling off those names, I thought, "Oh, man, here we go", but then that turned out to be pretty much the beginning and end of any surface political talk. So I'm basically okay with it on that level. That scene just makes me wince, is all. So does the Evil Military angle, to be honest, but without that, there's no movie, and there would be no paranoid thrillers without paranoia, so I view that as a plot point more than anything else.
Anyway.
Quick addendum: I'd be even cooler with the idea of lefty paranoid thrillers if I could just get one good righty paranoid thriller.
That scene just makes me wince, is all.
But that's what makes it so mordantly funny to me. The conversation is between a sanitation worker and a waitress. The waitress is apolitical (she suggests Pat Riley and Dr. Joyce Brothers) but the sanitation worker, coded as Jewish (and played by a Jew) has all of that lefty baggage and his references are at least a decade out of date. By 1988, Linus Pauling was nearly 90 years old and nearly 30 years past his Nobel Peace Prize. Harry Belafonte is like a 50s reference and Dick Gregory was completely forgotten as a political voice by then. And the biggest thing Jane and Tom had going for them at that time was their impending divorce. That's what's so sadly funny about this exchange, is that this guy is clinging to the Golden Age of Lefty Politics as a way of saving the world but he's so hopelessly out of date and out of step.
Well, I'll admit: coming from that character in that situation, the whole thing does seem kind of goofy, and the film does obviously have a sense of humor. So maybe you're right. I just assumed, from that exchange, that DaJarnett was an ex-60s radical, and wanted to inject some of his Truths into the proceedings before moving on to the film's primary business. Perhaps I shouldn't have. But it is a paranoid lefty thriller. We're agreed on that, right? And in the context of the film, it was Reagan who launched the missiles, and who, in collaboration with the military, conspired to keep it secret the American public the fact of their impending doom brought about by their hand. So in that context, the idea that the filmmaker thought, "You know who could have stopped all this? Jane Fonda" doesn't, or at least didn't, seem too far-fetched.
Considering that a few years before the film's release, Reagan had infamously joked at a press conference about bombing Russia into oblivion, so at the time the film didn't seem all that paranoid.
But sure, one can't argue that Miracle Mile isn't grounded in a liberal headspace... the film starts with a lecture on evolution and ends with the damn' dirty apes blowing up the planet.
On the other hand, I think that DeJarnatt played it more pragmatic than dogmatic...
This is the first film I used in an experiment I recommend to anyone who's into movies.
I refrained from reading about new or upcoming movies for a month.
After a month, I went to the theater for the Friday matinee.
I kept my eyes away from the marquee. I had no idea what was playing.
I went to the box office and told the girl to give me a ticket to the first show of whatever film just came out that day, adding, "No, don't tell me what it is, I want to be surprised!" She went along with the game and told me to go to theatre #1.
I kept my eyes away from the posters in the lobby.
I went into theater #1, went through a few trailers and then saw the title Miracle Mile on the screen. I had no idea what it was, who was in it -- nothing.
The stars came on screen and I didn't know who Anthony Edwards was, and I was vaguely familiar with Mare Winningham. When John Agar showed up, I didn't recognize him.
Not knowing it was an end-of-the-world movie, it swept me from beginning to end. To this day it's the best viewing experience I've ever had in a theater.
I need to see that movie, really.
I also recently watched this film after two decades and was just as surprised as you at how wonderful it still is. Even the outdated fashion and color combinations give it a strange, almost otherworldly quality that is immediately striking and original. The music by Tangerine Dream is hypnotic.
I still love this film, and would easily add it to my list of movies, alongside things like Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD and Alex Cox's REPO MAN (another strange L.A. art film) that struck a chord somewhere deep inside my teenage self as beautiful works of pop art.
As a side note, I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that Paul Chadwick's lovely comic about CONCRETE in the movie industry, subtitled FRAGILE CREATURE, is directly inspired by his exhilarating and frustrating experiences working with friend Steve DeJarnatt on this film. It really showcases how they got to make the film that they wanted to make, but also how it was to get there, and makes for an interesting companion piece.
Jason
http://www.moviemorons.com/
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