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Last Exit to BrooklynIt's hard to imagine now that Last Exit To Brooklyn has been accepted into the canon of classic cinema, but back in 1989 it was a risky proposition. Convincing a studio to make a big budget feature out of a book with such a lurid, controversial reputation and with such bleak themes was a considerable feat. Conversely, it needed a brave team to take on such a totemic book, already regarded as an untouchable American classic. Its many story strands and characters were notoriously difficult to wrestle into a compact script. It was a challenge that no less a figure Stanley Kubrick had already given up on.
Luckily director Uli Edel and his script writer Desmond Nakano were equal to the task. It would be stretching it to say that the film surpasses Hubert Selby Jr's book, but it is at least an excellent interpretation, and one that, with its grimy aesthetic and atmospheric images of the dives, factories and mean streets of 1950s Brooklyn, brings Selby's prose to life. These streets form the backdrop to a series of related tales of violence, despair and debauchery.
There's Tralala , the ultimate Madonna-whore who sees the soldiers and sailors around Brooklyn's docks as nothing more than a source of money she can steal. Until, that is, she stumbles into something approaching a real relationship and the experience ruins her, creating a self destructive inferno that Jennifer Jason Leigh portrays with real power and hard-bitten style.
Walking the same streets with an even greater tragic dignity is Georgette (Arquette) a transvestite junkie: loved and loathed equally by the local toughs and clearly doomed from the start. Georgetta is friends with Harry Black (Lang) who wants to be a union big shot, but lets himself down with small-time book-cooking and the secretive homosexual affairs that keep him from his duties.
And so it goes on, every kind of hard-luck loser and abuser doing everything they can to make the bad place they live even worse. There are brutal fights and messy couplings, Edel proving as adept at depicting painfully intimate scenes as he is in his handling of the memorable epic sequences where he makes brilliant use of what looks like a cast of thousands.
None of this is particularly uplifting and when it first came out the film was criticised heavily for its grim nihilism. There's more to it than that. The message isn't so much one of despair, as of resilience in the face of great horrors. It doesn't promise universal happiness, but it does show that there's always some pleasure to be found, even in a life full of pain. It's moving and painfully effective.
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