Miracle Mile is an incredible film. It's so good that it took three weeks for my thoughts on it to clarify. Here’s a rambling repetitious review.
But before you read this, know that this film is best seen cold. Also, if possible, late on a humid night with some beers. I haven’t put any plot-breaking spoilers in this film beyond the opening set-up, but all the same, I advise going in cold. But if you want, read on…
Miracle Mile is a stretch of Los Angeles basin that houses trashy fashion stores, neon diners and a seemingly endless parade of gas stations. It’s also a manifestation of the impossible within a set distance. And then there’s the image of a man running at an impossible speed, breaking a long distance record to a standing ovation, going down in history as the man who ran the Miracle Mile.
This film is all these things and something else again, something slick and monstrous and filling the air between the concrete and glass geometries of the LA strip. It is the shades between impossibility and probability. It is a compass speared into the heart of a boulevard and with a flick of the wrist a circumference figuring 1,609 metres from hypocentre.
This is where our man Harry stands, in the centre of Miracle Mile on a hot night.
Harry’s first miracle is that he meets the girl of his dreams and its pretty much love at first sight for him, and happily, for her. They meet at the LA Tar Pits on Miracle Mile. Harry is an odd mix of David Byrne and Glenn Miller, a nerdish trumpet player in a big casual pastel suit, all gawky angles and spectacles and strange confidently awkward charm. Julie is a supremely relaxed ginger haired girl-next-door in a dress-next-galaxy, sharp and funny and predatory. Under a postcard blue sky and yellow sun they talk, laugh, liberate restaurant lobsters and stare at the fibreglass mammoths wallowing in the bubbling tar pits of a natural history museum. Quickly he meets her estranged parents individually in the same garden complex. He treats her to a hot-dog and a brass-band trumpet solo. It’s a typical first date, if you’re David Lynch.
There’s a TV movie languidness at play early on, which I really enjoy. The scene unfolds gently, with a straight to video MTV colour palette, backed with soothing right-side-of-cheese synth music by Tangerine Dream. They make a sweet couple. Julie informs Harry that she’s got her work shift at the diner that night, after which, they’ll go out and dance and then screw. Be there at ten-thirty.
So far Miracle Mile has been a placid stroll through romantic-comedy trappings. Sweet, clumsy, postcard romance in a dream-like washed out land of electric trams and ice-cream coloured apartment blocks straight out of Demolition Man.
Harry sleeps in. It’s not his fault, no, not really his fault at all. He discards a cigarette which a bird plucks and drops in a nest which starts a fire which shorts of a transformer which plunges his apartment block into darkness. He awakens over an hour late and in awakening plunges from dream to nightmare.
She’s not at the diner, she was but she’s not anymore. She gave up waiting. Harry, uptight and furious with himself tries to find out from her fellow waitress where she’s gone. Loyal to her friend Julie she responds with sisterly sass and he stalks out to the phone booth to call her. But there’s no answer and he’s forced to leave a message. He puts the phone down on the hook and exits the booth.
The phone rings behind him. He returns, picks it up. “Julie?” But it isn’t Julie. It’s a man. A man who is crying – near hysterical. He asks for his dad and when Harry tells him he has the wrong number, the guy really breaks up. He tells Harry that he’s locked in, that they’ve shot their wad and the birds have flown and the other side will be picking them up in fifty minutes and that we’ll get ours back in seventy-five. He tells Harry to call his dad, tell him he’s sorry ……… And just when Harry, beginning to sweat, demands of him whether this is some sort of sick joke, he hears a door opening – a question – a panicked response of, ‘No Sir, I was just testing the circuits… no! NO!’ and then the sound of gun shots.
A voice picks up on the other end and calmly replies to Harry’s panicked enquiry, “Just forget everything you heard here… and go back to sleep.”
Charlie Brooker called it the “Biggest lurch in tone in a movie ever,” and he’s not wrong.
Questions:
Is Harry hearing voices that aren’t there?
Is he subject of a sick joke?
Is there a dead body in a silo full of ICBM-exhaust fumes and a ticking clock?
These are the questions that will test the audience until the end of the film. But to Harry, there’s only one answer: Find Julie and get out of LA. This seems an easy task, but Harry in his role of Chicken Little unwittingly becomes a hypocentre all of his own, radiating chaos and panic as he trades his own truth regarding imminent nuclear attack for goods and services in his bid to escape. His car stolen by practically the first person he panics, Harry must increasingly rely on the already heightened and paranoid Los Angeles community for what he needs, even if it means taking by force.
The film’s shot through with imperfections, of course. There are side characters that seem to step straight out of Saturday Night Live sketches, do their shtick and disappear. There’s a certain contempt towards humanity which sits uneasily and there are far too many hastily sketched stereotypes. A good deal of the acting is on the raw, clumsy side. Oddly, this doesn’t seem to matter and in fact enhances the film. There’s absolutely no polish to Miracle Mile. The film almost reads like an inspired first draft written by a man hopped up on a mixture of National Geographic, cold war paranoia, Bill Hicks and plenty of cocaine. The direction and writing (same guy) is almost evangelical in its intensity, and other than pacing it breaks countless edicts in the Hollywood cinematic rule-book. There’s absolutely no referencing in this film to any other movie, either in word, visual or action. The continuous shifts in tone from horror to comedy and back again keep it giddily off-kilter, sending you stumbling with Harry through the streets. It has absolutely its own style which is akin to a slick fever dream, a gaudy nightmare played out on deserted streets under threateningly open wide-angle skies.
Certain moments loop in my mind weeks after seeing this film. Denise Crosby with a mobile phone the size of a film guide. Gunshots in a midnight aerobics class. A SWAT team member falling from his rappel line, picking himself up and running after his fleeing comrades. The most ridiculous dress in screen history. Fat Man Diner, the inside like some tacky Demolition Man set. The dour, drunkenly mocking face of Dr. Silberman from the Terminator franchise. The fantastic improvised-in-five-minutes-nonsensical-Harry-Belafonte-incorporating-survival-of-the-species-plan. A girl in a shopping cart. Crawling through sewers shot through with dust and light and panic overheard and overhead. Harry’s nerdish suit. “Straight to fucking Tijuana!” And Harry running-pacing-running near burning up with panicked, freaked out energy. This is a film that does not stop. It’s insane.
And yet here’s something special. No matter the insanity and panic everything Harry and Julie do is entirely reasonable. Harry has been plunged from a sane world into a nightmare in the space of two minute phone call and entirely unprepared and freaked out as he is there’s no decision he makes which you can really argue against. In a calmer seventy five minutes a more practical seeming plan could probably be devised, but not one that would be any less absurd under the real-or-imagined nuclear shadow of a mushroom cloud. His plans are only really undone by the panic and fear that he generates, one that leaps from himself to others like a one hundred percent communicable virus. A spreading fear that is almost hard-coded to trigger when certain ominous words are spoken.
All this could come across as a camp pantomime of course, were it not for the concept providing an abundance of dread and – completing a winning hand for this movie – the score by Tangerine Dream. Now, I’d only really known Tangerine Dream through the mixed success of Christopher Franke’s epic bombast-on-a-budget work on the TV series Babylon 5. Here Tangerine Dream knock it out of the park. The haunting other-world music heightens the dream-state of the film, whilst at the same time being supremely eighties and really anchoring you in that strange, unpleasant decade. It’s relentless and propulsive as well, with a really driving beat echoing the aching slap of Harry’s feet as he races down the LA streets. Amidst the pulsing tone the music will suddenly shift up into a full-throated synthetic glissando, a wordless choral rise of sound that made me think of words too horrible to speak becoming stuck in the throat. It’s the perfect match for the mood and ideas of this film and is probably one of the most fitting soundtracks I’ve heard.
In closing, you need to pay homage to this one-man’s vision offered up by Steve DeJarnett. He had a hard time making it and it was in production hell for a long time before he bought back his own script for $25,000 and got it made himself. This baby of his is like The Twilight Zone amped up on a cocaine binge – and the ending’s fantastic, beautiful and horrifically intimate.
You can only buy this through import on Region 1, by the way. So feel free to Yo-Ho-Ho until our nation sees sense and it gets shown on TV. Even on the TV-ration torrent I found it’s a treat, if anyone finds a good widescreen hi-def feed out there, please let me know.
Hell, it's even worth flying out to Metal Angel's and catching it on his VHS copy.
Rating:
Pete
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