Dead Again

From the early to mid-1990s, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson was a power celebrity couple that managed to be incredibly popular, especially in their native United Kingdom, while also steering clear of being absorbed into the Hollywood system. They both brought considerable pedigree to their relationship as he had been responsible for revitalizing Shakespeare in cinema with highly acclaimed adaptations of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996), while she was a Merchant Ivory star with Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). Not surprisingly, they appeared in several films together, most notably Peter’s Friends (1992), the aforementioned Much Ado and my personal favorite, the psychological thriller Dead Again (1991), before divorcing in 1995.

Dead Again was Branagh and Thompson’s brief dalliance with Hollywood, but on their terms. It is a modest neo-noir indebted to the films of Alfred Hitchcock with Branagh and Thompson playing dual roles in 1940s flashbacks and also present day. This film is often forgotten in their respective filmographies, which is a shame as it features a smartly written screenplay by Scott Frank and excellent performances from not just the lead actors, but the entire cast. The end result is a clever and engaging thriller.

Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh) is an ex-cop turned private investigator that specializes in missing persons cases. He’s doing nickel and dime jobs when asked to do a favor for a priest that took him in at Saint Audrey’s Home for Boys when he was quite young. A woman (Emma Thompson) showed up one day unable to speak and suffers from amnesia as well as horrible nightmares that take place in the 1940s where a famous composer by the name of Roman Strauss (Branagh) is convicted and sentenced to death for killing his wife Margaret (Thompson) with a pair of scissors. Roman professes his innocence, claiming a thief killed his wife, but his alibi doesn’t hold up and evidence points towards his guilt.

Branagh films these flashbacks in rich, atmospheric black and white in an obvious homage to classic film noir, complete with the ominous use of shadows, like when Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), the reporter that covered the murder trial, visits Roman on death row. These sequences really allow Branagh to ramp up the style and have a bit of fun. Andy Garcia has a plum supporting role as a disheveled, alcoholic reporter that has been spinning his wheels since World War II ended. The actor has his character’s look down cold with the rumpled clothes and unshaven (yet still handsome) appearance, but wisely doesn’t go over-the-top as would be the temptation for a drunken burn out like Baker.

Mike is enlisted to find out who this mysterious woman is and he’s immediately taken with her beauty (Thompson at arguably the height of her loveliness). After one look at the deplorable conditions of County Hospital, he decides to take her home. Branagh and Thompson are good in these initial scenes together as he plays Mike as a nice guy who nervously talks incessantly while she adopts a timid, fragile stance as her character is at the mercy of the world. There’s definitely a spark of attraction between Mike and this woman, which is enhanced by the chemistry between the two actors. After doing some digging, he finds out that Roman and Margaret were actual people and that she was murdered and he was executed for the crime.

The next day, a hypnotist cum antiques dealer by the name of Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) shows up at Mike’s door claiming that he can help the woman figure out her identity. Derek Jacobi has a delicious role as a hypnotist who is a bit of an opportunist, putting people under not only to help them, but to also find out if they have any valuable knick-knacks that he can pilfer. Mike is dubious that Franklyn can help her, but goes along with the sessions. Once under hypnosis, she recounts how Roman and Margaret met and fell in love. As the film progresses, Mike tries to figure out how these recollections from the past inform the present. Is this mystery woman somehow the reincarnation of Margaret Strauss? Was he Roman? Will history repeat itself?

Early on in the film, Emma Thompson relies on her expressive eyes and facial features to convey the extreme emotions her character experiences. In doing so, she not only gains Mike’s sympathies, but also ours. Once her character is able to talk, the actress brings even more charm to the role as abundantly evident in the scene where Mike makes dinner for her character. If we haven’t become fully invested in her character’s plight then this moment seals the deal.

Kenneth Branagh does a fine job essaying a stereotypical cinematic gumshoe of the West Coast variety. He certainly doesn’t do anything to rise up in the pantheon of such characters and it looks like he’s having more fun in the flashbacks playing a famous German composer jealous that a rumpled reporter shows romantic interest in his wife. These sequences allow Branagh to act more theatrical and pretend like he’s in a classic Hollywood movie.

Being involved in real life certainly helps Branagh and Thompson’s on-screen chemistry, which is fantastic, but not every real-life couple have it so this was a bit of a gamble for them to take. Fortunately, it pays off. The looks that the two of them exchange throughout the film are warm and feel genuine. Looking back now, it’s hard not to feel a few pangs of nostalgia looking at an apparently happy couple that are no longer together.

Also of note is Robin Williams playing a small, but memorable role as a disgraced ex-psychiatrist working at a local convenience store dispensing advice to Mike. It’s a semi-serious role that saw the famous funnyman cracking jokes, but with the bitter edge of someone burnt out from life. The normally solid Wayne Knight adopts a distracting lisp/whistle through his teeth when he talks that seems like a bit much and an obvious attempt to make his character more colorful than it really is.

After his directorial debut with Henry V, Kenneth Branagh was keen to film an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. After a booking in Australia fell though, Branagh and his wife, Emma Thompson, found themselves in Los Angeles performing Shakespeare’s King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the theater troupe he had founded in 1987. It happened to coincide with the announcing of the Academy Award nominations. Henry V was the recipient of several, including Branagh for Best Actor and Direction. This caught the attention of Hollywood and he was approached by several studios keen to work with him. However, they only knew him from Henry V and weren’t interested in his new project. He started getting screenplays for art films, biopics, and war films: “All the Vietnam pictures that never got made,” he remembers. None of them appealed to him.

Then, producer Lindsay Doran sent him Scott Frank’s script for Dead Again. She had commissioned the script from the writer while at Paramount Pictures in 1986. She subsequently moved to Sydney Pollack’s production company where, with Frank’s help, began looking for a director. She saw Henry V and felt that Branagh was the right person for the job. When he read Frank’s script, Branagh was blown away by it. The script made him think of Alfred Hitchcock films like Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945) and Dial M for Murder (1954) – motion pictures that made big impressions on him when he was younger. He felt that Frank’s work had “all the classic ingredients of a mystery thriller on a noir-ish level. It was a good yarn, underneath which it touched lightly on the sense of ‘Are we meant to be with people in relationships that we resolve from lifetime to lifetime?’” Branagh immediately pictured Derek Jacobi as the antiques dealer and Thompson as the mystery woman with no memory. However, Doran initially only wanted him to direct, but he was also wanted to act opposite his wife with them playing dual roles that were originally intended for four different actors. In addition, he also wanted to cast Jacobi and a few key crew members from Henry V to work on it. The studio agreed, but only if the film had a couple of well-known American actors in it.

Branagh worked hard to adopt an American accent, spending hours listening to tapes and spending time with Frank. “I knew I had to deliver more than just a collection of representative sounds. Vocal cadences and rhythms had to be believable.” He also worked on his character’s body language by observing people walking around in L.A. and then going into shopping malls and trying out what he learned. Thompson found her role challenging because “if you’ve lost your memory you’ve lost your power to relate to anything at all … memories are not available to you, and you find you have very little to say … The principle thing you discover is it produces intense loneliness.”

Dead Again received positive to mixed notices from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “This film is made of guignol setting and mood, music and bold stylized camera angles, coincidence and shock, melodrama and romance. And it is also suffused with a strange, infectious humor; Branagh plays it dead seriously, but sees that it is funny.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Branagh doesn’t exactly transform the absurdities of the story into great art, which was probably never his intention. Instead he recognizes them without condescension, turning out a most enjoyable and knowing homage to a kind of fiction that, though dead, keeps coming back.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “There’s little passion behind the pyrotechnics: you never quite shake the feeling that you’re watching a talented cast playing an elaborate game of Let’s Pretend. Still, be grateful for the genuine amusement Dead Again supplies. It may be cotton candy, but it’s well spun.”

Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The two lead performers triumph during the flashback sequences, which are really the heart of the film … Thompson and Branagh don’t do a parody of classic Hollywood acting so much as an homage to it. They made me appreciate the focus of the great old stars, the way they could define, with intoxicating clarity, the emotions on which a scene spun.” However, USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Thanks in part to some fundamental miscasting, this convoluted whodunit (half-period, half-contemporary) is a misconceived attempt to establish just-plain-folks credentials.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley found the film, “a campy Gothic melodrama about one couple’s ongoing hassle with bad karma … this overwrought and overly facile look at accounts payable in the afterlife.”

Screenwriter Scott Frank creates an intriguing murder mystery as we wonder if Roman really killed Margaret in the past and who is Thompson’s amnesiac character in the present? Both storylines dovetail rather nicely at the film’s exciting climax, which goes off the rails a bit as Branagh’s flair for theatrics gets the better of him. Frank has gone on to become one of the best, most consistent writers working in Hollywood and while Dead Again is not a major work, it doesn’t try to be. The film is a clever cinematic equivalent of a page turner – entertainingly executed by Branagh and company.

SOURCES

Arnold, Gary. “Ken and Emma Put Their Act Together.” Washington Times. August 21, 1991.

Black, Kent. “Married … With Chutzpah.” Los Angeles Times. August 18, 1991.

Koltnow, Barry. “Irish Actor/Director Aims at America with Dual Role in Dead Again.” Orange County Register. August 21, 1991.

Lacey, Liam. “No Longer A ‘Classical’ Person.” Globe and Mail. August 19, 1991.

Portman, Jamie. “Irish-Born Actor at Home as Los Angeles Detective.” Ottawa Citizen. August 23, 1991.

Weber, Bruce. “From Shakespeare to Hollywood.” The New York Times. August 18, 1991.

The Falcon and the Snowman

Why would someone sell top-secret government documents to their country’s enemy? Fame? Money? Disillusionment? With the rise of websites like WikiLeaks, a non-profit organization which publishes secret and classified information, and recent, high-profile American whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, John Schlesinger’s 1985 docudrama The Falcon and the Snowman has become relevant yet again. Based on Robert Lindsey’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same name, the film dramatizes the story of Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn), two young men who sold classified government information to the Soviet Union during the mid-1970s. Schlesinger’s film attempts to explore the motivation behind their actions in this absorbing drama – one that features riveting performances from its two young lead actors, Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn.

The opening credits play over a montage of quintessential American imagery, like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and pivotal events and people from the 1960s, like the Vietnam War and Martin Luther King, Jr. It takes us through the ‘70s with Richard Nixon, John Lennon and Patty Hearst to show the cultural and political upheaval that occurred in America at that time. It also suggests that these turbulent decades possibly motivated the film’s protagonists to do what they did. Or, at the very least, it established a socio-political climate for their disillusionment in what America had become.

Andrew Daulton Lee is a drug dealer who traffics narcotics across the Mexico/United States border. He’s friends with Christopher Boyce, who quit the seminary and gets a job at RTX, a civilian defense contractor, thanks to his ex-FBI father (Pat Hingle). Boyce is quickly promoted to a top-secret division that involves CIA-controlled spy satellites. On his first day, he meets Gene (Dorian Harewood), a co-worker that uses a paper shredder to make margaritas. Dorian Harewood is excellent as a bitter Vietnam War veteran who believes that the CIA isn’t bold enough in its covert operations, especially when it comes to a leftist prime minister in Australia. Boyce does some digging and finds out that the Australian P.M. opposed to U.S. influence and that the CIA has tried to oust him from power.

Lee is understandably paranoid and unable to trust any of his fellow dealers. He wants Boyce to go into business with him because they have been friends since childhood. Boyce argues that they don’t need the money as they both come from wealthy families to which Lee replies, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” This rather succinctly summarizes capitalism in a nutshell. One day, Boyce decides not to shred a CIA document with details about covert actions that have nothing to do with national security. He’s disgusted at the level at which is own government manipulates foreign press and political parties to deceive their allies. He always believed that his own government only spied on its enemies and not its friends as well.

Boyce tells Lee who first suggests going to the media, however the former proposes selling the information, which the latter balks at. After getting busted for drugs and facing some serious prison time, Lee has a change of heart and agrees to act as a courier for his friend. While Boyce is largely motivated by disillusionment over his government’s covert practices, Lee is motivated by money and the perverse thrill of being a spy, but is clearly in over his head as evident by the Soviet contacts he meets. The problem is that Lee treats their interactions like a drug deal while they see it very differently. They are much more cautious and serious about what they’re doing.

At one point, Lee even foolishly asks his Russian contacts to help him smuggle heroin from South America. Their expression, when he suggests it, is priceless. The problem is that Lee is reckless and brazenly takes unnecessary risks. His judgment is clouded by the heroin he snorts so Boyce decides to sell the information on his own, which, naturally, complicates the relationship with his friend. Special mention goes out to veteran character actor David Suchet as Penn’s contact at the Russian embassy in Mexico City. He comes across as cordial at first, but once Penn’s character gets sloppier in his methods, Suchet shows just dangerous it is to mess with his Russian official.

Adopting a cheesy, thin mustache and slightly reedy voice that intensifies when he is extremely agitated, which happens a lot as the film progresses, Sean Penn disappears into this role. What’s so impressive is that he did this film fairly early on in his career (with only a handful of film credits) and yet shows quite a command of his abilities. Early on in the film, Lee conveys the confidence of someone who comes from a wealthy background. Maybe he originally became a drug dealer to alleviate the boredom of being rich, but by the time we meet him drugs have become a full-blown lifestyle, one that is increasingly encroaching on his affluent one. Lee goes from being a savvy dealer to a pseudo-savvy spy and finds that they share many of the same skill sets. Penn nails Lee’s cocky swagger and yet still suggests how much he is out of his depth when dealing with his Russian handlers, especially in the scene where they finally tire of his antics. The actor really dazzles towards the end as Lee unravels thanks to huge helpings of drugs and paranoia.

Timothy Hutton is very good as the all-American Boyce who has everything and believes in his country, but there are hints early on that there are cracks beginning to form, like the strained relationship with his father that plays out in a tense scene between the two men, suggesting years of friction. It is fascinating to see how the friendship between Boyce and Lee disintegrates over time as the latter takes advantage of the former, which isn’t helped by his escalating drug habit. Hutton and Penn have good chemistry together and are believable as lifelong friends.

Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were childhood friends from the affluent Los Angeles suburb Palos Verdes and who attended the same elementary school and were fellow altar boys. Boyce was only 22-years-old when his father got him a job as a clerk at TRW, a defense contractor, which built and operated spy satellites. He soon had access to highly classified documents. Boyce stole the documents, gave them to Lee, who then sold them to officials at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. In 1977, they were convicted of selling classified documents to the Russians. Boyce was sentenced to 40 years in prison and escaped from the maximum-security facility at Lompoc, California in January 1980, managing to stay free for 19 months before being caught. For his role, Lee was sentenced to life in prison.

Director John Schlesinger was attached to the project early on and guided it through four years of attempts and two studios before it was made. Initially, The Falcon and the Snowman was at 20th Century Fox, going through three screenplays only to be dropped for being too costly to make. Schlesinger said, “It was a problem getting the film started again. A rejected film always has the mark of Cain on it.” Fortunately, producer Gabriel Katzka was able to get financing from Orion Pictures and Hemdale Film Corporation. Schlesinger was able to reduce costs – the budget was a modest $12 million – by shooting most of the film in Mexico with a residential area outside of Mexico City doubling for Boyce and Lee’s Palos Verdes suburb and a Mexican university standing in for the defense company that employs Boyce. According to Schlesinger, “we only had to remove the anti-American graffiti.”

To prepare for the role, Timothy Hutton talked to Boyce regularly by phone and met with him in prison, bringing him a copy of the script. After Boyce read it, the two men went through the entire document all in an attempt to portray the man as accurately as possible. Lee was not a fan of Robert Lindsey’s book as he felt it portrayed him as an antagonist that corrupted Boyce. He was even less thrilled that it was going to be adapted into a film. In preparation for playing Lee, Sean Penn met and talked to him on the phone several times and was impressed with the man. He found that Lee was “no longer a confused kid. He was, in fact, a man of utmost clarity and moral conviction.” Then, Penn began physically transforming himself for the role by getting a set of teeth made and then altering his eyebrows and hair until not even his mother recognized him.

Penn and Schlesinger did not get along too well during film. He felt that the director had a “disregard for the true story,” and didn’t like “the choices I was making physically” for the character. According to Penn, Schlesinger took a “very interesting story about these two guys and turned it into an insert-picture in a lot of ways: too much information, too much Teletype.” During filming, the actor was prone to acting “in the moment, searching for the truth of the scene, rather than its effect,” recalled David Suchet. As a result, Penn and Schlesinger got into several arguments. After two weeks they stopped talking to each other and began communicating through assistants.

The Falcon and the Snowman received mixed reviews from critics with most citing Sean Penn’s standout performance. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and felt that the film “never steps wrong, but it is best when it deals with the relationship between the two young American spies.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby praised the performances of Hutton and Penn: “Mr. Hutton is quite fine in a role that must remain mysterious. His Boyce seems to be well-meaning but more than a little muddle-headed. Even so, he’s a model of rectitude compared to the loose-talking, heroin-hooked Lee, the biggest, most flamboyant role Mr. Penn has yet done. It’s Mr. Penn who dominates the screen with a performance that, like the film, is arresting in its bizarre details and as col as ice.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen praised Penn’s performance: “Sean Penn is more than good in this role: he’s astonishing. With his pathetic little mustache, bad Beatles haircut and wormy bravado, Penn abandons all vanity to give us one of the most unglamorous – but scarily hilarious – portraits of callow youth ever. He may have the greatest range of any actor of his generation, so totally does he disappear into this creep incarnate.”

However, in his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “Despite Hutton and Schlesinger, The Falcon and the Snowman does tell a terrific story, and the tale is sufficient to hold interest right up to the mishandled ending. The film is being subtitled ‘a true story’ and it’s probably a good thing; no writer of fiction would dare invent such a thing. But a writer of fiction would take care to make certain the motivations of every character were dramatized.” The Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio felt that the book the film was based on was stronger: “But since everything that’s interesting about Penn’s performance comes out of the book, not the script, it just plays like empty bravura. Everything about this movie is backwards – where Lindsey was fascinated by the way political and cultural themes were grated on what was essentially just a scam, Schlesinger starts with an idea of an era, then contends that his characters were the products of it. Instead of a story, there’s just a lot of footage of the falcon flying around, toting his subjective camera, and, like the audience, at the end of its tether.”

If The Falcon and the Snowman has any flaws it’s the rather bland direction. One can see why Schlesinger took this approach as the story and the performances are so strong that he probably didn’t want to distract from them. However, just imagine what someone like Michael Mann could’ve done with this material? One only has to look at something like The Insider (1999) to see how dynamic a film about people talking can be with world-class cinematography. Slightly flashier direction could’ve elevated The Falcon and the Snowman from a good film to a great one. That being said, the story is engrossing and the cast deliver top notch performances, especially Hutton and Penn who are very convincing as young men pretending to be spies and unable to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, the filmmakers don’t judge Boyce or Lee – they leave it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions. What the film does try to do is explore what motivated their actions and how it affected their lives. The rather haunting song, “This Is Not America” by David Bowie, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays plays over the end credits and does a nice job of summing up what we’ve just seen. The song takes us out on a somber, sobering note as we’ve just watched film with no clear cut heroes and villains – just a lot of flawed people who are motivated by very personal beliefs and obsessions.

SOURCES

Goulding, Joan. “Actor Sean Penn Urges Release of Convicted Spy.” United Press International. January 18, 1985.

Hay, David. “The Falcon Who Clipped CIA’s Wings.” Sunday Mail. February 17, 1985.

Kelly, Richard T. Sean Penn: His Life and Times. Faber & Faber. London: 2004.

Morgan, P. “The Actor and the Falcon.” Courier-Mail. April 27, 1985.

Scott, Jay. “Timothy Hutton’s No Favorite in the Celebrity Sweepstakes.” Globe and Mail. January 21, 1985.

Thomas, Bob. “Another ‘Fringe’ Film for Director of Darling, Midnight Cowboy.” Associated Press. January 24, 1985.

Miracle Mile

“I think I’ve always been a romantic kinda guy, just never had someone to be romantic with before.” These are the first words spoken by protagonist Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards), a big band musician who is about to meet the love of his life. Too bad the world is going to end. Miracle Mile (1988) is not your typical romantic comedy. During the 1980s, with the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia hanging over the world like a horrible specter, apocalyptic movies were all the rage, from thrillers like The Manhattan Project (1986) to thoughtful meditations on the subject, like Testament (1983). Somewhere in the middle is Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt. His film is an impressive fusion of the romantic comedy and thriller; starting off with a charming meet-cute between a musician and a waitress only to shift gears into a tense, race against time.

Unfortunately, the film wasn’t given a decent enough theatrical release and promptly disappeared onto home video where it gradually developed a small, but dedicated cult following. Miracle Mile deserves to be rediscovered, with its engaging, fully-realized protagonist who is thrust into a nightmarish scenario while trying to find the love of his life. For all of its exciting, thriller conventions, De Jarnatt never loses sight of the film’s humanity – something that is missing from a lot of contemporary genre offerings.

“Love can sure spin your head around. God, where do you begin?” says Harry Washello in a voiceover narration at the beginning of the film. Where indeed? Why at the beginning, of course – the Big Bang as De Jarnatt cheekily cuts to an educational film about the creation of our galaxy, Earth and life on it. Harry meets Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) at the La Brea Tar Pits museum and it’s love at first sight in a beautifully edited montage that plays over the opening credits. It is scored to the lush, angelic electronic music of Tangerine Dream, a fixture among soundtrack work during the ‘80s. It sets up a wonderfully romantic vibe as we watch Harry and Julie spend a sun-kissed day laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

There is a dreamy kind of optimism usually associated with romantic movies, but Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham are not your stereotypical picture perfect couple. They are more realistic, like some you might actually know. De Jarnatt wisely takes the time to let us get to know Harry and Julie and let them get to know each other. It makes their romance believable and, as a result, we care about what happens to them later on because we’ve become emotionally invested.

They hit it off and plan to meet later, after she finishes work at a diner on the famous Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. He goes back to his hotel and takes a nap, setting his alarm for later that night. A freak accident knocks out the power, which causes Harry to oversleep and he misses their date. When he finally wakes up, Harry rushes down to the restaurant where Julie works only to find out that she has gone home long ago. He intercepts a frantic call on a nearby pay phone from a guy in a nuclear missile silo that will change his life. He is told that the United States has gone to war with the Soviet Union and he has 70 minutes before a nuclear missile hits the city. It is a chilling scene as the poor guy was just trying to call his dad and got the area code wrong. Harry then hears the man being shot and killed over the phone. Another voice comes on the line and tells Harry, “Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep.”

It is at this moment that Miracle Mile goes from being a sweet romantic comedy to a white-knuckle thriller as Harry tries to convince the people at the diner that what he heard over the phone was true. This sequence is beautifully staged as some people don’t believe him or don’t care while some take him very seriously, like a woman named Landa (Denise Crosby), who has connections in the government (in a nice touch we are introduced to her reading Cliff’s Notes for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow). Anthony Edwards anchors this scene so well as we see the realization of what is going to happen register on his face. Harry goes from disbelief to shock to panic and then tries to explain what he was just told to the diner patrons.

Once Harry decides to find Julie, the film’s narrative rapidly gathers momentum as he races against time with every minute more urgent than the last. And we’re right there with him as we’ve grown to empathize with the guy, having spent the first third of the film getting to know and like him. The rest of Miracle Mile plays out like some kind of waking nightmare, like something spawned from the mind of Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone. The race against time takes us through L.A. after hours with Harry meeting all sorts of colorful characters and getting into all sorts of crazy situations that, while extraordinary, are believably depicted because of the amount of stress he is under. De Jarnatt conveys the increasing chaos as knowledge of what’s happening spreads through the city gradually, building in intensity until it culminates in a full-on riot that is incredibly convincing on what was a relatively low budget. It’s on par with anything a studio could crank out at the time only with a better script and a solid cast.

The always reliable Edwards does a great job as an every day guy caught up in an extraordinary situation. He has a very relatable everyman quality that is used to great effect in Miracle Mile. He anchors the film as its sympathetic protagonist and does a fantastic job of showing Harry’s transformation over the course of the story as he gets increasingly frantic. Yet, he tries to maintain a calm façade for Julie’s sake, but has the knowledge that the world will end before most people, which weighs heavily on him as Edwards so nicely conveys through facial expressions. You can see that Harry is not only trying to process what’s happening, but also trying to figure out a way to escape with Julie.

I like how De Jarnatt establishes all the locations that will become crucial in the second half of the story in the first ten minutes of the film. There are also sly cultural references, like Denise Crosby’s character reading Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which is about the V2 rocket launching, a precursor to nuclear missiles. There are also several nice, little moments, like Julie’s estranged aunt and uncle reuniting after years of bad blood, brought together by the knowledge that they have very little time left. They want to spend what’s left with each other. It’s a nice bit of humanism amidst the chaos.

When he was younger, Steve De Jarnatt experienced vivid nightmares about nuclear war. In 1978, he decided to write a screenplay that articulated some of these fears and it became Miracle Mile. At the time, he was an aspiring director fresh out of the American Film Institute and wrote the script for Warner Brothers. However, they envisioned a bigger budget film and didn’t want to entrust it with a first-time director. The studio put the project in turnaround for three years and De Jarnatt spent all of his money - $25,000 – to buy and rewrite it. In 1982, the studio offered him $400,000 to option it, but he turned them down.

De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well. By 1983, De Jarnatt’s script was chose by American Film magazine as one of the 10 best unmade scripts.

Actor Anthony Edwards read the script for Miracle Mile on a plane ride and remembered, “going, ‘Oh, god. Oh, oh, come on! I can’t believe this!’ I threw it down and said, ‘I can’t believe someone wrote this!’” When he got home, the actor recounted the story told in the script to a friend who was amazed by it. The actor agreed and realized that he had to do the film. Edwards used whatever clout he had left over from the success of Top Gun (1986) to help finance the film. Hemdale Films’ John Daly was willing to take a chance and gave De Jarnatt a $3.7 million budget.

Miracle Mile received mixed to largely positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Much of the movie’s diabolical effectiveness comes from the fact that it never reveals, until the very end, whether the nightmare is real, or only some sort of tragic misunderstanding.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden praised the performances of the two leads: “Mr. Edwards gives Harry the same appealing gawkiness that he brought to Revenge of the Nerds, the movie that made him famous. Ms. Winningham imbues Julie with a flashing intelligence and sweetness.” The Los Angeles Times’ Erik Hamilton wrote, “A sort of new-wave nuke film, Miracle Mile is intense, humorous and powerful. And, yeah, it’s also sometimes off the wall.”

However, in his review for the Globe and Mail, Chris Dafoe wrote, “The only miracle in Miracle Mile is the way it manages to make nuclear war seem as fluffy – and about as troubling – as Miracle Whip.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “Of course, this is the stuff of suspense thrillers, but writer-director Steve De Jarnatt sets an unsure pace that tries our patience. It seems he’s not committed to his story or his characters, but to the idea that he is saying something profound – which he isn’t.”

While Miracle Mile didn’t make much of an impact when it first came out, its influence can be seen most recently in the monster movie Cloverfield (2008), whose significant plot points mirror the ones in De Jarnatt’s film rather closely. During the ‘80s, there was a very real, tangible threat of all-out nuclear war with people like Ronald Reagan threatening to wage war if provoked by the Russians. Miracle Mile taps into these feelings of fear and paranoia to startling effect, all under the guise of a taut thriller. To his credit, De Jarnatt doesn’t sell out and instead takes things to their logical conclusion, which probably killed its commercial prospects, but the film is better for it. The truth is that we are still just as close to being annihilated by nuclear war and this makes Miracle Mile as relevant now as it was back in the day.


SOURCES

Emerson, Jim. “The End of the World – as Miracle Mile Knows It.” Orange County Register. May 28, 1989.

Richardson, John M. “Miracle Mile Made with Slowly Measured Steps.” Los Angeles Daily News. May 28, 1989.

Taylor, Rumsey. “Miracle Mile Q&A with Anthony Edwards and Steve De Jarnatt.” Doomsday Film Festival. November 3, 2011.