`Last Days of Disco’ drains life from an era

“THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO.” Written and directed by Whit Stillman. Running time: 112 minutes. Rated R (for language, brief nudity and adult content). Nightly, July 6-9, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

In “The Last Days of Disco,” Whit Stillman, the director of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona,” has a surprising misstep, waltzing clumsily through a film that should have been alive with the bump and grind of an era, but comes off with little more than a whimpering twirl.

What’s so curious about “Disco” is that, if it weren’t for the music or for the film’s opening credits stating that it takes place “in the very early 1980s,” one would be hard-pressed to associate it with the disco era at all. Indeed, costume, makeup and production design are so minimal, and sense of time and place are muddled, it suggests the mid-’90s, not early ’80s, an inexcusable oversight in a period film.

Compounding the problem is the young cast, who grew up in the age of AIDS, not the age of Aquarius, an important difference that shows in their inability to let themselves go and give in to music that should ignite them, not leave them stilted and unmoved.

Paul Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” effectively captured the euphoria of the disco era, but Stillman’s film drains the life out of it. His characters are not sexually free, but sexually repressed, which makes them suspect. Who are these people? They go to discos not so much to dance as to launch into philosophical conversations while on the dance floor. Indeed, they are so pseudo-cerebral, there are moments when you half expect them to dance the “Nietzsche,” shake their anal retentive booties (if that’s possible), or, more fitting, do the “Collective Jung.”

In great part, the disco era was about illusion, but Stillman never creates the necessary illusion to pull this film off. He has cluttered his script with conversation — endless conversation. His priggish characters, desperate for status (not fun), deconstruct “Lady and the Tramp,” while those around them are content just being tramps (and having a better time). Stillman’s point may be that disco had something to offer those who weren’t in it just for the dancing, drugs and sex, but if that is the case, it is his job to make clear exactly what that point was. Unfortunately, he doesn’t.

If only he had listened to Alice (Chloe Sevigny), the film’s main character, who, at one point, offers a prescription for a best seller: “Create characters with whom the audience identifies, give them problems, make the problems big.” Stillman doesn’t offer identifiable characters, but he does throw in some monumental problems. Namely, his script, his actors, his memory of the time, and, ultimately, his film. Grade: D

Video of the Week

“WAG THE DOG.” Directed by Barry Levinson, written by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin, based on the book “American Hero” by Larry Beinhart. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R (for language).

Here’s a stretch: It’s just days before the presidential election and the president of the United States has been accused of luring an underage “Firefly Girl” into an anteroom of the Oval Office.

Unfortunately for the young girl, the president hasn’t taken her there for cookies and milk or for a surprise meeting with Linda Tripp, but for a lurid sexual act.

What are all the president’s men to do? Put a spin on it — and fast.

As the president’s opposition candidate starts playing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in his campaign ads, White House aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) calls in spin meister Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) for an emergency session. The result? Ames and Brean decide the commander-in-chief needs a Gulf War-style conflict to distract the country — and the media — from what is brewing as the Firefly Girl Scandal.

Still, which country to annihilate in an imaginary war?

Of all countries, they choose “shifty, standoffish” Albania, and quickly contact Hollywood mogul Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to produce the war, which he does with biting acuity (and with the help of Willie Nelson, who composes a “We Are The World”-type song through which the country is gloriously unified).

Too much of a stretch? Director Barry Levinson doesn’t think so. His timely political satire asks us to reconsider not only the Gulf War, but also Grenada — and our own naivete. Never heavy-handed or moralistic, Levinson’s film may not be as good as “Bulworth,” but it does have great fun at our expense while also getting us to laugh along with him. And that, when you think of it, is no small feat. See this. Grade: B

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.