Review of The Last Picture Show (1971) by Torsten D — 25 Jan 2004

January, 25th - DVD:

This film is as interesting as watching a flower wither. What is shown in this film is ugly, dirty, mean and most importantly inevitable. The only things this bunch of unlikeable characters seem to have on their minds is with whom to go to bed with next and how to hurt each other. They hurt each other physically and they hurt each other emotionally. They kill each other directly and indirectly. There is more drama per minute in this film than in "Gone with the Wind". They don't care about the consequences, but why should they? They still can move on and that is what some of them do.

The withering flower loses petal over petal and it doesn't stretch to reach the sun. The characters turn their city into a ghost town, but they don't care and I didn't either. I didn't even pity them and I didn't blame them either.

But there are more flaws. There are some unnecessary subplots and characters (like the plot about the priest's son). I also didn't like that you never really tell that time has passed or how much time has passed between the sequences. The acting, especially Ben Johnson and Timothy Bottoms, saves the film from drowning and there were two scenes that I liked: the speech by Ben Johnson at the water tank and the scene where Timothy Bottoms and Cybil Shepard try to escape.

However, in the end I really couldn't see why somebody considered this story to be worth telling in the first place. It doesn't tell anything new, special, interesting, insightful, meaningful or wonderous. It shows the dying year of an organism that (at the point where the story begins) already was too sick to be saved. That's it.