4:44: Last Day on Earth

Abel Ferrara – 2011 – USA 
  

It’s an Abel Ferrara film, and you know what that means: tons of existential anguish and Willem Dafoe nudity.  I don’t mean to sound derisive, because I actually like Ferrara a lot and I enjoyed this film too.  It’s got “pretentious” written all over it and yet somehow it transcends the conceits of its premise – (people coping with the imminent Judgment Day) – and I kind of admire Ferrara’s audacity in the same why I admire Francis Ford Coppola’s in his recent films; both filmmakers, some time ago, seem to have arrived at a point where they’ve decided to not bother being nervous about looking glib or affected.  Why should they?  Ferrara has paid his dues as an uncompromising independent filmmaker who has mostly avoided selling out all these years except inasmuch as he often makes use of name actors in order to encourage at least a little box office.  Sometimes I think he’s the only American director working in the forgotten vein of John Cassavetes with his semi-improvisational urban dramas populated with desperate souls on the brink of madness.  As in his film Mary (2005), Ferrara here tries to reconcile global apocalyptic premonition with private moral strife.  Intensely personal, so many of his films have characters (and Ferrara himself) wrestling with the urge to do something meaningful in life and to connect with fellow human beings in some sort of spiritual way, even as individual encounters fail miserably.  As Al Gore’s prophesied ecological doom approaches, Dafoe and his artist girlfriend spend their last hours playing, fighting and reaching out to family and strangers; trying to retain some semblance of normalcy and community in the face of disaster.  Just as the film itself could be seen as the thinking man’s alternative to frivolous end-of-the-world disaster blockbusters by the likes of Roland Emmerich, so too do these characters consciously resist cliché temptations to revert to selfishness and savagery during the Earth’s last moments.