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Hustling in a New Day / Before Carter and Reagan there was `The Last Days of Disco'
(3 1/2 stars) Young Manhattanites boogie-oogie-oogie, in Whit Stillman's Proustian exploration of urban manners, discarded innocence and the onset of modern times. With Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar. Written and directed by Whit Stillman. 1:52 (adult content, drug content, nudity). At the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Broadway at 63rd Street, the Sony 19th Street on Broadway and the Coronet, Third Avenue and 59th Street, all in Manhattan.
WHIT STILLMAN is everything he's not. Or, rather, not what he's supposed to be. With "Metropolitan," his too-smart-for-his-own-good debut, he was seen by some as having exalted the self-absorption of upper-crust preppies, when all he really did was use them as a mirror for universal anxieties. Likewise, "Barcelona," which was misinterpreted as right-wing apologia, but seemed far more concerned with the personal than the political.
Chilly? Aloof? No, Stillman's movies (which now number three) are, if nothing else, intensely intimate, because they're never anything but fully aware of the audience - in the poker-faced jokes, in the enormous non sequiturs, in the closing of a bedroom door to keep out - who? Us! The characters might work themselves up over the most ephemeral matters, but life is like that - entire lives, entire worlds, can be revealed in the way one wears a hat, or shaves one's face.
With "The Last Days of Disco," Stillman ventures forth into more allegedly vacuous territory - the bacchanalian club scene at the cusp of Carter-Reagan - and finds in it the last age of innocence: Will so many ever again be so enthusiastic about so little? Studio 54 is never mentioned, but the club that serves as the center of the universe for Alice (the utterly magnetic Chloe Sevigny) and the rest of her friends is clearly modeled after that fabled temple of pre-AIDS indulgence. Velvet ropes, imperious doormen, desperate swarms hungering for entry. Getting in is as much a concern for Alice and her dubious friend Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) as their upward mobility at the publishing house, or getting an affordable apartment, or who loves whom among the Harvard boys who dance the nights away.
There is less plot than there are issues. Des (Stillman regular Chris Eigeman) is on thin ice at the club: He keeps letting his friend Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) in, but Jimmy works in advertising and club owner Bernie (David Thornton) hates ad agency people. There's a big pile of cash hidden in one of the back rooms that Des knows about and is trying to ignore. ("What are you going to do?" "Well, I'm not going in that room anymore.") His friend Josh (Matt Keeslar), the manic depressive assistant district attorney, is orchestrating a bust of the club, Charlotte wages subtle emotional terrorism on roommate Alice ("Maybe in physical terms I'm a little cuter than you") and sexually transmitted diseases are little more than social concerns (getting in touch with previous partners, for instance, can be a way of renewing promising relationships).
"The Last Days of Disco" is on one hand a snapshot of a peculiar place and time, on the other a look at who we were and what we are now. The last in what Stillman considers his nightlife trilogy, it carries with it a considerable melancholy, a yearning for lost youth, and does it on a national scale. In this regard, Josh becomes the most interesting character, because he represents the future - or at least its most valuable asset, the ability to extemporize total blather with heartfelt conviction. What matters - in public life, at least - is not what you say but how convincingly you say it, how you make yourself mean it. And Josh, whether he's making sociological theory out of "Lady and the Tramp" or bidding adieu to the disco era ("Something this big and important will never really die"), is poised on the threshhold of greatness.
Is Stillman? It depends. This isn't an epoch that inspires or even tolerates grand gestures, so if that's your definition of greatness, then the answer is no. Even if he were so inclined, Stillman's strong suit is as wry observer, an almost anachronistic example of the artist-critic who probes deeply and profoundly into the culture around him. He may wield a quill pen, but it has a scalpel at its tip.
John Anderson
Staff Writer
Newsday
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