The inspiration for the legendary Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Neal Cassady was the avatar of the Beat Movement. Cassady, who died at 42 after an all-night drinking binge, is the main character of The Last Time I Committed Suicide, a series of incidents whose atmospheric lyricism suggests the influence of Gus Van Sant. Stephen Kay—the actor and T.V. director Stephen T. Kay—uses a zigzagging time structure, character-voiceover, lots of hand-held camera, a mixture of color and black and white. Cigarettes somersault through space; young people reek of potential to lose at life. Material of this sort has little trouble taking hold of my heart.
I couldn’t care less that this small independent Canadian film strikes me at least as being closer to O’Neill-1920s than to ’50s-Beat.
Based on a letter of Cassady’s, Kay’s film finds the future great one when he’s a kid in his twenties. Cassady’s life appears to be in a holding pattern around which circles a thoroughly conventional suburban dream—a cottage, with a white picket fence—that his fingers can’t quite reach for some wildness in him undercutting his will. Having abandoned the girl who would have helped make his dream a reality, Cassady writes a friend, “But, as you know, this wasn’t the last time I committed suicide.”
This is a piece about conflicted youth and their tangible-intangible dreams. And it’s a film about older characters, too—characters who have been abandoned by their dreams. Hence the downbeat mood and fragile charm, the feeling of frayed, loose, about-to-be-lost and already lost connections.
The female roles remain sketchy, perhaps because Cassady’s girls are an index of his projective needs. (Although omnipresent in the film, Cassady’s bisexuality is never made explicit.) However, three of the male roles have drawn full, wonderful work. Thomas Jane (the crazy thug of Boogie Nights) is excellent as Cassady; sweet and modest, his performance succeeds in holding the center of the film. (Footnote: Nick Nolte dazzles as a later Neal Cassady in John Byrum’s Heart Beat, 1980.) As Jerry, Neal’s co-worker on a Goodyear graveyard shift, Jim Haynie creates a thoughtful portrait of one whose life experience has cost him all his illusions. Skinny Adrien Brody delights as Cassady’s gay friend. And then there is Harry, the pool table-drawn barfly whose open though smarmy manner masks terrible loneliness and bitterness—an O’Neill role if ever there was one. Keanu Reeves is brilliant in the part—as brilliant as Olivier or Jason Robards might have been. Pitched between Jamie Tyrone and Shakespeare’s Iago, seesawing perilously between presumptuousness and god-awful embarrassment, Reeves’s Harry discloses misdirected intelligence, a core of despair, a wasting, selfish life. Driving to the heart of darkness of an emotional cripple who is likely consumed by repressed homosexual guilt, this is powerful, adventurous acting.
All the more credit to Kay and Reeves, then, for keeping it from unbalancing the whole. And all the more credit to Reeves for reminding us that he is one of the greatest actors on Earth.
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Dennis Grunes 