The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Written and directed by Whit Stillman

This is one of those overly talky movies that manages not to say much of anything amid its endless stream of "witty" conversation and empty cultural references. The plot centers around a bunch of Harvard graduates forging out their early adulthoods in a variety of upward first jobs, set against the backdrop of a Studio 54-like club in "the very early 80s."

Director Whit Stillman takes a promising setting and renders it irrelevant by focussing on utterly self-absorbed idiots. The result is something like The Big Chill or Diner, using "classic" songs wall-to-wall to layer "meaning" on the film, but Disco is not even as good as either of those pieces of mediocrity—and at least Diner had Steve Guttenberg.

Disco does, however, have a grown-up MacKenzie Astin, but the sad reality is I'd rather have sat through a movie-length edit of five late-period "Facts of Life" episodes.

Part of the problem is that Stillman has gone overboard in trying to establish his principal argument: that disco culture was, by the end, more of a social texture than the central fabric of anything important. Vital as it may have been in its glory days, disco circa 1980-81 was supported by latecomers and poseurs to the scene, a watered down version of what it once was. To his credit, Stillman is the only film director that has ever cared to make that important distinction: to strip away the rose-colored romanticization of the disco era and portray it as it was. He just doesn't do it very well.

A lot of movies in recent years have used disco music and imagery to try to conjure a sort of lost era of decadence, very few having any success in keeping it real. This film was an opportunity to tap into the "last days of Rome" feeling of early-80s club culture, but it follows the wrong people.

A much more interesting concept would have been to get inside club culture by tracking some actual participants. I'd love to see this era addressed without the ironic hindsight of movies like Boogie Nights and Carlito's Way (both of which are a hell of a lot more fun than The Last Days of Disco).

Clearly, it was not the director's intention to provide a chronicle of disco's decline, but the point he does have—that for lots of yuppies, disco was an unrecognized ideal of freedom as well as a harbinger of the status-consciousness to come—seems belabored and obvious. I admire the ambition of anyone trying to dissect the meaning of disco, I just wish someone could do it right for once.

The film is plagued not only by having a cast of almost entirely unlikable characters, but also by having a cast of almost entirely bad actors to portray them. Each character is a one-dimensional caricature (the sexually repressed single girl, the obnoxious party girl, the cocaine-abusing womanizer, the weasly ad exec, the troubled lawyer), and each actor is a one-trick-pony. The casting director must have been like "So, can you do a coy glance?" "Yes, I think so." "Okay, you're hired. Now you—how's your knack for prattling on?" "Fine." "Great, you've got the part. Now, you—ey, weren't you on 'Facts of Life'?"

The use of music is another sore point. At times ridiculously literal (at one point they play "I'm Coming Out" and cut to a close-up of two gay men dancing—and it's one of the only times the film depicts gay clubgoers at all), at others simply banal ("I Love the Nightlife," used without irony) … perhaps Stillman is trying to emphasize the idea that this is not, in fact, a cutting-edge club, but rather precisely the sort of place a bunch of Harvard grads would go to think they are hitting an "in" club.

Pah! I say that Stillman (who also wrote the script) simply doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. Neglecting to portray any gay characters, even though it was the gay clubs and clubgoers that propelled disco to its zenith, is a serious misstep, too—the only "gay" character is actually a straight guy who claims he's gay to break up with women. Perhaps this is meant to show that by the end, it was straight people that diluted and ultimately killed disco as a cultural movement. Still, a movie calling itself The Last Days of Disco should purport to do more than use the era as set decoration.

I am further confused by why anyone would want to make, or watch, a movie about WASPy, overeducated, miserably unhip yuppies—it's like an even more self-obsessed Woody Allen without the jokes. In other words, horseshit.

Review by Olean Oleander Orenthal O.