After David Mamet, Whit Stillman has probably the most recognizable screenwriting style around today. He unveiled it with Metropolitan (1990) and developed it with panache in Barcelona (1994) but in this his third film it starts to feel more than a tad too contrived.
Whereas in the earlier films the inward-looking world of the preppie scene (Metropolitan) and the close relationship of a couple of expatriate cousins (Barcelona) gave Stillman’s mannered, affectedly erudite dialogue a good measure of charm and credibility, here there is a mis-match between the director’s repertory approach and the nature of the subject matter – which interrelates a “Friends” avant la lettre-type scenario with a muddled plot about the death of disco involving drugs, money and the IRS. Despite the diversity that this involves, Stillman’s characters, particularly the males, all look and talk the same, that distinctive “yuppie” identity that the director favours is so homogenizing that at times it becomes difficult to tell them apart.
Inexplicably replacing Taylor Nichols who exemplified the type so well in the two earlier films (he appears in a brief cameo here, as does Carolyn Farina who starred in Metropolitan), Chris Eigeman becomes the main character, Des, a manager at a fashionable disco, whose only occupation it seems is to hob-nob with a circle of cookie-cut friends who include Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloë Sevigny), college chums who work as readers at a book publishing company, Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin ), a junior advertising exec. who takes clients to the disco to impress them, and, Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), a lawyer with a conscience and a history of erratic behaviour.
With a wall-to-wall soundtrack of disco classics this is fun for a while but starts to pall as Stillman’s characters spend their time doing little but tossing well-tooled insights to each other ranging from observations on the ideological implications of Disney animated films of their childhood to the benefits of sexually-transmitted diseases (no mention of AIDS though) while in the background the crowd at the never-ending visits to the disco remains pretty much the same and a brief allegory of the fall of disco is sketched in.
In itself The Last Days Of Disco is cleverly enough scripted to divert but compared to the director’s earlier efforts a bit too obviously templated to impress..