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Chris Cabin Beloved by Ebert. full bio of Chris Cabin 4:44 Last Day on Earth is a film about the end of the world but, even more importantly, it is the latest Abel Ferrara flick and this, more or less, is the whole baseball game. And to be completely honest, the particularly curmudgeonly tone the film takes on the whole would be insufferable in any other director's hands. But 4:44 Last Day on Earth is a film so carefully steeped in Ferrara's artistic persona, a grubby, violent and hugely charming set of visual tics and proclivities, that it makes even the most nagging bouts of cynicism, the most unsuccessful dicey decisions, feel endearing. It is also, in many ways, the most engaging and moving work in the entire oeuvre of cinema's designated poet laureate of New York City old and new.
But man, those dicey decisions. The conversation starts with the casting of Shanyn Leigh, Ferrara's muse and current off-screen squeeze, as Skye, one half of a Manhattan couple deciding what to do with their last hours on earth. "Al Gore was right," we hear NY1's anchor Pat Kiernan say before he gets off camera to be with his loved ones, but past that, some flickers of the word "ozone," a sudden blackout and some bargain-bin special effects, we don't really get an idea how the end will come or what was the last straw. It certainly isn't what Skye and her negligibly older husband, Cisco (Willem Dafoe, forever Ferrara's wild-eyed proxy), are interested in, which isn't to say that they aren't seriously grappling with the very concept of the end times. But these struggles of philosophy, morality, psychology, and society come up in ways more familiar to the Ferrara loyal: it's your last day on earth, you're gonna break 20 years of being clean and spike up as the world itself ends forever?
It's a question worth asking and fits snuggly next to intermittent contemplations of jumping off the roof of your six-floor walk-up, long, carnal bouts of lovemaking, painting your final canvas and watching your neighbors plummet from their fire escapes. The other thing they do a lot of is Skyping, with their parents, their loved ones, and a couple of friends who decided to spend the crest of the apocalypse jamming out one last time. In one of the film's most improbably effective scenes, they allow their take-out boy to Skype with his family halfway around the world, and it's Leigh's hippie-dippie response to this that raise the first red flag, so shrill is she in her melancholy. But she is, thankfully, more of a physical actress and at that, she is quite exquisite and, more to the point, she serves significant use in the film's volatile self-reflexivity.On one hand, the film is a dream of neverland NYC, a stoned eulogy to what was the city that never sleeps but now needs two Ambien and an Airfit pillow to get an hour's rest. But it suggests also an urgent inner dialogue between Ferrara the human being and Ferrara the artist, as Dafoe's Cisco grows more and more frantic and needy and Leigh's Skye seems only interested in finishing her last painting and making love. The commentary extends to the end of film, as Cisco and Skye's last visions and memories come to them pixilated, on the screens of hi-def televisions, Air Books, iPads and, yeah, other Apple equipment. The film itself is shot largely on digital, with only flashes of 35mm found in vulgar thought montages that are actually the strangest part of this peculiar work.
Written by Ferrara as well and featuring a not all that surprising cameo from Anita Pallenberg, 4:44 Last Day on Earth offers irrefutable proof that we can no longer simply ignore Abel Ferrara as an essential American auteur, for the film is by every measure a personal and singular view of a subject that is becoming increasingly familiar. The film exudes Ferrara's longstanding love of maniacs and outcasts, as well as the other denizens of his beloved borough. It's also inarguably the most intimate picture Ferrara has ever directed. The most memorable sequences are not long diatribes about the afterlife from the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders both famous and not, or even the emotions that erupt when Skye encounters Cisco's ex through a Skype chat, but those physical moments that Ferrara shoots with his loose style and limber, liberal use of camera movement, a byproduct of his relationship with his most regular DP, Ken Kelsch. It's a film by a cynic, to be sure, but a cynic who still is in desperate love and voracious lust with life.
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