The Last Good Time
With Armin Mueller-Stahl,Olivia d’Abo, Lionel Stander,Maureen Stapleton, Kevin Corrigan, Adrian Pasdar, and Zohra Lampert.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In The Last Good Time the solitary character is a retired immigrant violinist and childless widower named Joseph Kopple (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s living in a decrepit and anonymous (if typical) one-room apartment in Brooklyn. This space isn’t expressionistic or stylized in any obvious way, yet it’s amazing how expressive Balaban and his production designer, Wing Lee, make it; indeed, it’s made to say quite different things about Kopple at various times over the course of the film. Suggesting an expressionism that’s internalized and minimalist, this simply and starkly appointed space is something we experience as the inside of Kopple’s head, and the complex camera maneuvers performed within this apparently constricted arena manage to keep it both fresh and familiar, like thoughts that are both recurring and evolving. Thanks to Balaban’s compositions, which had a comparable pristine power in Parents, these thoughts are arranged before us like items in a Joseph Cornell box.
An approach that is this acutely aware of itself is clearly limited when it comes to spontaneity. But it’s part of Balaban’s achievement that he never overshoots his mark by trying to go beyond what his material has to offer. Emotionally and thematically, this is a perfectly measured movie; it always knows when to cut and when to keep the camera running, it never allows a scene to become unduly rhetorical or sentimental, and it always remains entirely believable. In many respects these qualities perfectly match the control-freak personality of Kopple himself, who makes out a list not only of what to do every day but of what to wear. They also reflect the parsimonious lifestyle assumed by–and often forced on–the elderly: having to estimate how much energy one needs to get up or down a flight of stairs, for instance, is a problem that rules much of the life of Ida (Maureen Stapleton), another upstairs neighbor of Kopple’s whose solitary life contrasts with and parallels his own. (It’s a poignant moment when Ida angrily denounces Kopple in his flat for his mean-spiritedness, then has to knock at his door again to solicit his help in climbing back up the stairs.)
In his own life Stander was something of a good-time Charlie, and Howard Singer shares this capacity. (In a 1971 interview Stander said, “There were blacklisted actors who committed suicide….But me, I have always lived on the champagne level. I figured that I needed $1,250 a week to break even, so I went to work on Wall Street, where there is no blacklist. I became a customer’s man, and I managed to live in the style to which Hollywood had accustomed me.”) When Kopple gets laid he brings a bottle of booze and cigars to the rest home to celebrate his triumph with Singer. His friend offers a toast: “Here’s to your liver and your dick.” It’s one of the nicest aspects of The Last Good Time that the precise meaning of the title remains pointedly ambiguous, though there’s clearly a suggestion that good times occasionally last longer–and come later–than they’re supposed to.
