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Film
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The Last Shot
So how does this comedy stack up to Alec Baldwin’s previous Hollywood send-up State and Main? It’s not quite as biting, but the true story it’s based on is a humdinger.
Friday, September 24, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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From the painted old school poster art to its cast of talented but commercially unreliable stars, The Last Shot joins the ranks of so many other memorable movies about moviemaking that succeed by virtue of the fact that they don’t have the budget to successfully pretend they’re really making that movie-within-a-movie. Rather, the trials and tribulations of getting the real thing made are all up there on the screen, writ large in some awkward display of soul-baring screenwriting, and make the accomplishment of getting the whole thing completed and into theaters that much more impressive.
Like State and Main, Living in Oblivion and In the Soup, much less high-profile hits like The Player and Bowfinger, The Last Shot is wish-fulfillment in a manner of speaking for writer-director Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me if You Can). But by peppering his story with so many eccentric and authentically evocative characters, he creates an end result that feels more like a major Hollywood production than a one-off opportunity for a screenwriter to direct his own material.
In the story, which is based loosely on actual events, Alec Baldwin stars as Joe Devine, an FBI agent desperate to get off the third-string beat in second-rate cities and really, truly fight some crime just like his brother Jack (Ray Liotta). Hatching a hair-brained plan to front a budding filmmaker in order to infiltrate a low-level mobster and perhaps uncover a link to “big fish” criminals like John Gotti, Joe greenlights a little-known project called Arizona, whose writer-director Steven Schats (Matthew Broderick) has been shilling to producers and studios heads for years.
Before long, Joe and Steven find themselves embroiled not only in one of the most egregious misappropriations of government funds in American history, but in the fledgling production of a movie about a woman lost in the desert that now much be shot in Providence, Rhode Island. As the seemingly unlikeliest project ever to go into production grinds into gear, Joe’s dream of a career-saving bust begins to meld with Steven’s determination to get his movie made, and the pair soon find that their respective ambitions - secret though they may be to one another - are combining into one catastrophic and ultimately fruitless venture.
Baldwin has been on the comeback trail since his memorable and deservedly acclaimed turn in Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler, and he continues to prove that his mid-nineties lull was a result of poor choices and or offers rather than revelation that his early promise as an actor would go unfulfilled. As Devine, much less as anyone (think Along Came Polly’s perpetually, obliviously obnoxious boss Stan), Baldwin’s commitment to character is admirable and continues to set him apart from performers of his generation.
Like few other actors, Alec has managed to survive a death-knell commercial nadir and come back as a critical favorite, proving with each subsequent role that he still has much memorable work left to accomplish in Hollywood before he departs show business. Upcoming appearances in The Aviator, Elizabethtown, The Swimmer and others look to continue that career trajectory.
Matthew Broderick, on the other hand, has failed almost as often as he’s succeeded in recent years, his starring role in the Broadway smash The Producers notwithstanding, Broderick’s movies have fallen far too often into lackluster rom-com territory (such as Addicted to Love) instead of career-defining turns like Ferris Bueller and Election’s Jim McAllister.
At the same time, he nails perfectly the cheerful desperation of Schats’ luckless world, and personifies the haplessness of mid-‘80s filmmaking (during which the film is set), wherein a neophyte director could rise and fall without so much as the slightest peep from the now-ubiquitous entertainment media.
Nathanson fills in the remainder of his cast with a collection of gifted supporting players, including the always-nuts Toni Collette (Connie and Carla) as an air-headed starlet, Tony Shalhoub (Men in Black) as a dumb but vicious mobster, Calista Flockhart (TV’s Ally McBeal) as Steven’s high-strung girlfriend, and Tim Blake Nelson (The Good Girl) as Steven’s brother and secret collaborator. Still, it’s a testament to his emerging ability as a filmmaker (much less the limited scope of the project) that the cast comes together quite so cohesively. Instead of building his film around tentpole lead performances, Nathanson elevates the group as a whole by casting character rather than lead performers, and achieves an effect that strikes a satisfying balance between B- and A-level moviemaking.
Obviously, the size of a movie like this always comes down to the amount of money a studio will invest, and Nathanson makes the most of the chump change he’s been given. It never looks like anything less than a full-fledged production, even when the on screen crew members are attempting to recreate a lonely stretch of desert just yards away from Providence gravel pits.
The Last Shot is a small and modestly ambitious project - one perfect, in fact, for its first-time director - and it succeeds in appearing not only to approximate a real Hollywood production, but to actually be one itself. Though the events that inspired its telling may have heralded its characters’ last chance at a moviemaking career, it’s the first major step for Nathanson as a filmmaker in his own right.
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