| Jackson Stern |
The Last Detail plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 12th, through Sunday, September 14th, as a collaboration with the Cult Film Collective. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
We like to imagine that, when faced with prospects of injustice, repression, and hypocrisy from those in the highest of towers, we’d stand tall and together. We’d overthrow our oppressors by bashing them or, better yet, outsmarting them at their own cruel game. We’d cause a great uprising and forge a brave new world altogether. Not just for us, we say, but for our children and our children’s children. When faced with real-life bondage from our bureaucrats though, we rarely do any of that. So, if we aren’t brave or in sync enough for a revolution, what do we evolved human creatures do to cope with all the nation’s unjustness? We bitch. When studios balked at the foul language used by the blue-jacketed characters in his film treatment of Darryl Ponicsan’s 1970 novel, Robert Towne explained how these expletives, at least in his script, aren’t used for mere provocation. Instead, he insisted, they are to reflect the characters’ inability to improve a systematic injustice themselves. “This is how people talk when they’re powerless,” he’d later say, “They bitch.” And this powerlessness amidst the steel hand of a machinic authority is the central anxiety and understated sadness at the heart of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail.
The film begins not with a bang but with an ingenious, if unobtrusive, set-up where we first meet Buddusky (Jack Nicholson in a typically thoughtful performance that earned him the Best Actor award at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival) and Muhall (an undervalued Otis Young). The film sees these two handsome, if a little rugged, Navy men get an assignment and their immediate reaction to being told to report to a higher authority makes their attitude immediately clear: they’re pissy. They’re older guys in this unit and they’ve been around the block; ‘weathered’ is a good word to describe them, a word you can see in their eyes just by looking at them. They’re assigned to escort an eighteen-year-old kleptomaniac, Meadows (Randy Quaid in as powerful a role as he’s ever had), to a military prison after he’d been dishonorably discharged for petty theft. The sentence? Eight years (or six after two are taken off for good behavior, Buddusky unconvincingly insists). The damage? Forty dollars, money which was taken from his hands almost as soon as he had it in them. Now, eight years in prison on top of a dishonorable discharge for unsuccessfully trying to nab forty bucks seems like a pretty harsh punishment and that obvious injustice is where most of the film’s conflict initially derives from, both the outwardly explosive conflicts and the silent ones that chip away at our characters’ will from the inside out. It’s these injustices and our three different characters’ reactions to them that elevate The Last Detail above your standard 1970s road movie.
It becomes very clear throughout the film’s first act how the lead trio form a sort of triangle of discontent, each a different point with different ways of coping with the unfairness of the government and its systems, especially its military. At the top of this pyramid is Buddusky who is by far the brash and outspoken of the detail. He swears like a sailor (maybe because, well, he is one) and constantly pushes the buttons of the people (and invisible structures) that get in him and his companions’ way. One particularly memorable scene is when our characters enter a bar, wanting to show Meadows a good time before he’s locked in a cell for the better part of a decade. The bartender, some snobbish looking guy, won’t serve them because Meadows is very obviously underage. This sends Buddusky into a frenzy. He mocks the idea of the bartender having a gun beneath the counter before pulling one of his own out for him to see. It’s acts like this, these moments of irrational panic masquerading as masculine toughness, that show how Buddusky constantly tries to take control of things that he never can change. He doesn’t understand how or why these laws and rules are made and because he feels that they are obviously unfair, he acts out, almost like a child at times. But then, there is an element of self-awareness to his character that only ever comes out because Jack Nicholson is just that strong of an actor. The best example of this silent suffering comes in the form of a brief moment near the middle of the film where Buddusky looks out of a bus window, dejected, before staring at the back of Meadows’s head. All the while, it briefly dissolves to the outside of the moving vehicle, and we get this wonderful shot of this bluish, empty landscape. It’s one of those great Jack Nicholson staring shots, altogether unnerving and deeply sad. In this moment, he knows it’s bigger than him. Despite a position in the military, he’s just a pedestrian like everyone else, incapable of any real change where it matters. Another one of these small character moments is when the three men, buzzed after a night of feeling good, take to a small hotel room to cap off the night. The room only has one bed and two cots, one of which is broken. Buddusky insists on taking the broken one. This is not just an act of generosity, but an act of quiet defiance. He’ll choose the less desirable path over not choosing anything at all. It’s a decision that will render him uncomfortable for the night but it’s a decision that he made and, to Buddusky, any act of control over his own circumstance is all that matters.
The second point on The Last Detail’s “triangle of discontent” is Meadows. At first glance, he appears to be a shy all-American boy with obvious troubles but a good head on his shoulders. But as the film gives more peeks into his world, his sometimes questionable actions and acute timidity start to make more sense and evolve into something far from one-note. Like everyone else in the film, he’s lonely but in a way that doesn’t easily present itself. But unlike Buddusky, he doesn’t seem to have much desire to rebel against the corrupt, hypocritical bureaucracy that put him in this detail in the first place. He seems much more interested, at least at first, in letting things more or less roll over him. We find out early on that the only reason he got such a harsh punishment for this petty crime is because someone in a position of power has a personal connection to the crime—Meadows tried to steal from a charity collection box that the wife of the man worked with. Yet this obvious injustice and damning instance of hypocrisy doesn’t seem to bother Meadows all that much. He’s obviously in distress about going to prison but he knows, more outwardly than Buddusky, that that’s just the way it is. That’s not to say that he never reaches for any sort of control as his chronic kleptomania, detailed mostly early in the film, is an obvious way for him to take some little ounce of control in the hellish situation he finds himself in. At the first bus station, for instance, whenever his detail looks away, he pettily steals candies from newsstands for no real reason other than to give himself some sort of personal authority. Does he believe that these minuscule acts of defiance will lead to a greater fairness in the systems he falls under? Probably not. But it makes him feel just the littlest bit better and to him, maybe that’s all you can do.
The final point is Muhall (or Mule, as he prefers to go by) who falls somewhere in between Buddusky and Meadows in how he deals with the injustices of the government. Like Buddusky, he’s very outwardly agitated with all he can’t control but unlike his colleagues, he’s usually too afraid to take action in any real way. He has anger in his heart but he’s too scared to harness it in any real way because, like many of us, he’s too worried about the consequences of his actions if they fail to muster up any meaningful conversation. It’s in this way that Mule is perhaps the most identifiable character in the film, the easiest one for the audience to latch on to. Most of us are angry because we know that the game is rigged against us, but we don’t have the confidence to stand up and fight back. And that’s sad.
All of this culminates in an ending that’s much heavier on the bitter than the sweet. After a particularly emotional and snowy cook-out in which Meadows tries to run one last time before being caught and beaten by Buddusky, Mule and Buddusky bring him, their new troubled friend, in. There are no long goodbyes, no thank-yous, no anything. The guards just take Meadows away, leaving Buddusky and Mule left to stare downcast. The last two of the trio report to a commanding officer where Buddusky tries to take the blame for the beating. Meadows didn’t run, he insists, he beat him for no reason. This is Buddusky’s final stand, his final shot at inciting some sort of change or, no matter how late it may be, trying to protect Meadows from this system he knows very well to be broken. But it’s no use. Try as he did, nothing is done and Buddusky and Mule retreat back to where they came from. The top stay on top, and everyone else stays on the bottom. Business as usual. As they walk off, patriotic music plays but it is not a celebratory moment nearly as much as it is an angry and bitter one. You get the feeling that maybe their journey, unlike so many other films of its kind, didn’t change anything. They didn’t change anything in each other and they sure as hell didn’t change anything in the system. Just more stones at the bottom of a river. Maybe it all didn’t amount to much and maybe their travels weren’t an act of change, just a delay. But at least they tried. That’s more than a lot of us can say.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon