Set in 1952, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) is about people living lives they’re desperate to be freed from but never will be. It’s a bleak movie, something the director, Uli Edel, makes sure you don’t forget by giving everything a dour, desaturated look that makes even the days look like night. (Though it’s only in the real nighttime that everyone here seems the most obliged to live most honestly.)
Last Exit to Brooklyn isn’t bleak in a naturalistic way — in a way that makes the creeping-closer ruin these characters face feel anything less than contrived to make us feel as bad as possible. Everything feels heightened, even darkly comical; most characters are just a couple notches away from being full-blown caricatures. I was reminded, a little, of Twin Peaks (1990-’91), a show where human misery is rendered more antically than with an unmovingly straight face. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, though, never teeters into outright absurdity the way that series does.) Those evocations are enlarged by how the score, by Mark Knopfler, is grand but also clangs in the unsettling but frequently beautiful way Twin Peaks’ primary composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had perfected.
Last Exit to Brooklyn is an ensemble movie. The characters are connected by the corner of the city they commonly occupy and by how they all are living untenably. The atmosphere in Brooklyn itself is tense: the workers of the presumably biggest local factory in town are entering their sixth month of striking as the film opens. A key player in union efforts is shop steward Harry (Stephen Lang), who’s been promoted of late to strike secretary. The job gives him a sense of purpose, but it can’t do much to tamper the nightmare at home. Harry is married to a woman, and they have no kids; we realize the latter and the scary despair ambient in the one scene in which the wife appears comes from how Harry is hiding the fact that he’s gay. He’ll put it out into the open, at least for some people, a little way into Last Exit to Brooklyn, a movie where he’ll have a romance with an effeminate man who ends up not liking the desperation incrementally cresting in the classically hunky Harry.
Things won’t turn out happily for Harry. And they don’t for most of the other people populating Last Exit to Brooklyn, either: not the bottle-blonde sex worker, Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who thinks she might have found true love with the deep-voiced, boy-faced sailor who spends his shore leave with her exclusively treating her right; not Georgette (Alexis Arquette), a transgender woman who, it goes without saying, is treated horribly by nearly everybody but finds light in the love she harbors for a guy named Vinnie (Peter Dobson).
An exception is found in Big Joe (Burt Young), one of the striking workers. That mostly has to do with how he’s the only primary character here who truly has the autonomy to get to a happier place. It’s up to him whether he accepts that his teenage daughter (Ricki Lake) is pregnant and that her baby daddy will be in his life at least for a while. Pugnacious Joe’s hot temper prevents him, for most of the movie, from doing that. But he’ll get there; so will a victory for the strikers.
Those latter couple of happy occasions only makes Last Exit to Brooklyn’s endemic tragedy hurt more: not everyone in life gets to see their lives turn around for the better, and that’s so often truest for the people who have almost nothing to begin with.
EDEL’S BREAKTHROUGH MOVIE, Christiane F. (1981), has in common with Last Exit to Brooklyn its wall-to-wall misery. Only it’s played much straighter, and at one point features the kind of pleasure — in this case a David Bowie concert — that could never exist in Last Exit to Brooklyn’s living nightmare of a world, and not just because it’s set a few decades later. Though some of the movie can get a little sensationalist, especially during the particularly dire last act, the movie is otherwise a for the most part even-keeled, empathetic drama about a 13-year-old girl, Christiane (Natja Brunckhorst), who, mostly because of her overwhelming boredom at home and eagerness to at last grow up, gets addicted to heroin after inserting herself into West Berlin’s young nightlife scene.
I didn’t notice any moralizing, cautionary-tale condescension in Edel’s direction. With much help from a phenomenal Brunckhorst, he vividly evokes with unflashy storytelling and visual style how easily someone as young and naïve as Christiane could so quickly be in such close proximity to death. Neither her youth nor her naïvete is belittled; this is a movie that reminds you how much you felt at 13 like you concurrently knew everything you needed to and that you should be doing and being more than you are.
The movie is based on a 1978 book where the real-life Christiane recounted what she’d been through. Some of this adaptation softens how things really went; it allows its anti-heroine the easy ways out and more boring-than-actively-harmful homelife her nonfictional counterpart never got to experience. But Christiane F. is otherwise remarkable, the rare movie about drug addiction whose understatedness guarantees its potency.
Peterson Reviews 