What will you do
when the world ends?
Like most over-hyped media events, the apocalypse is turning out to be something of a bust.
Last Night, starring Don McKellar, Sandra Oh and Callum Keith Rennie, is directed by McKellar. Not yet rated by the MPAA.
By
Peter T. Chattaway
ChristianWeek film critic
The new millennium is still a year or two away, but movie theatres are already beginning to strain from apocalyptic overkill. In recent months, Hollywood has saved the world from comets and asteroids, and biblical characters have paid the modern world a wary visit in such irreverent indie flicks as Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life.
But, like most over-hyped media events, the apocalypse is turning out to be something of a bust. In these films, the world is threatened with doom but, somehow, it survives. Heroes rise to the occasion, astronauts blow things up before they can do much damage, messiahs decide they don’t want to judge the world after all, and the status quo is more or less restored.
In these anti-climactic times, Last Night is a quasi-fatalistic breath of fresh air. The film, set in Toronto and directed by that town’s ubiquitous creative workaholic Don McKellar, begins six hours before the world’s demise at midnight (eastern standard time, natch). Exactly why the world is going to end, and how everyone knows, is wisely left unexplained, nor is there any hint that the planet might be rescued at the last minute.
Instead, the question facing these characters is how they will live their last moments, knowing that death is imminent and inevitable.
McKellar himself plays Patrick Wheeler, a man who, mourning the death of his girlfriend, wants to spend his last moments alone with his music. But first he pays his token respects to his parents, reluctantly joining them for an ersatz Christmas party where he and his spunky sister Jennifer (Sarah Polley) are given boxes filled with report cards and other "presents" recycled from their childhood.
Leaving the party as soon as he can, Patrick heads home to find a woman sitting outside his apartment building. Sandra (Sandra Oh), it turns out, is stranded in the wrong part of town, thanks to vandals who trashed her car while she was looking for last-minute groceries in a deserted supermarket.
Torn between life and death, Sandra tells Patrick that she and her husband are planning to kill each other at midnight, to have some say in their destiny just before the world blinks out. She also tells him that she recently became pregnant, just to see if she could. Sandra is aware of her ethical dilemma, but she insists on carrying out her suicide pact–that is, if only she could find her husband, who isn’t answering the phone.
Ultimate New Year’s Eve bash
Patrick agrees to help her find her way home, past the mobs of people who are itching to find out what it’s like to kill someone, past the crowds who await the apocalypse as if it were the ultimate New Year’s Eve bash, and past the burning apartments that signify the nihilism of those who have given in, lost hope, and set about destroying things.
Along the way, they meet a bevy of characters pursuing different ends. Patrick’s buddy Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) is running through a checklist of sexual curiosities, spending his last hours in bed with a series of women–including his former high school French teacher (Genevieve Bujold)–and perhaps with at least one man, too. Another chum books an empty music hall for his debut piano recital.
Perhaps most paradoxically, shock-film auteur David Cronenberg plays a mild-mannered gas company executive who phones all his customers to let them know that their needs will be served right to the end.
Last Night’s appeal lies in the fact that, for all of us, death is inevitable. Hollywood fantasies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon acknowledge this, to some degree, by presenting heroes who boldly go to their own deaths in order to save the world. But eventually the world, too, must die. So how then should we live?
The film does not exactly answer this question, though it does suggest that the will to live is something precious in and of itself. Some people end their days in prayer, others in bed with strangers, others with guns pressed to their heads, trembling. The film admirably provokes its viewers to consider what they would do at the end of it all and, by extension, what they ought to be doing with their lives here and now.
