Miracle Mile - 1988
Directed by Steve De Jarnatt
Written by Steve De Jarnatt
Starring Anthony Edwards & Mare Winningham
It all comes down to that age-old question. If you knew the world was about to end - say, in about 1 hour - what would you do? Of course, perhaps the first thing you'd do is try to confirm that the world will
actually end in 1 hour, and make sure someone isn't pulling your leg. How much of that hour you waste doing that is up to you. It's the first step Harry (Anthony Edwards) takes in
Miracle Mile, Steve De Jarnatt's labor of love that took nearly a decade to create from inception to it's release. Harry's second step is finding and warning Julie (Mare Winningham) of the danger, and then rescuing her - they've only just began dating and falling in love, something which changes the tone of
Miracle Mile so drastically when the doomsday clock starts ticking, and the people of Los Angeles start tearing the place apart in blind panic. It's a very unusual, and surreal film.
Harry has unfortunately just stood his new girlfriend up, accidentally sleeping in due to a power cut in his building (fate : delivered by a feckless pigeon.) He arrives at the diner where she works at around 4am, and feels compelled to answer a ringing payphone. It happens to be a young person working in a missile silo, trying to warn his father that missiles are about to be launched and that a retaliatory response is to be expected in around 70 minutes time. You can forgive Harry for not quite believing it, but the call troubles him. It sounded like the caller had been silenced. Inside the diner, he hashes it out with both customers and employees - and there happens to be someone there (played by a young Denise Crosby) who can find out how reliable the information may be. When everyone decides that this could well be true, a race is on to a helipad which can hopefully transport these hopefuls to the airport and onwards to Antarctica - but Harry won't leave Julie behind.
Harry and Julie. There's is a really cute romance, with Harry being introduced as someone perhaps unlucky in love, and reserved. They meet at the La Brea Tar Pits, and size each other up over the course of the main credits sequence, almost going their own way. It's not the handsome guy and gorgeous girl we're used to in American feature films, but neither is this the story and tone we really get from any other feature. Winningham looks like she's been modelled on 1970s glam era David Bowie (that hairstyle is...something), and Edwards sports a blue suit only suitable for wear in the 1980s and absolutely no other time period. They do enough for me to buy that they're falling in love, and although neither were going to receive an Oscar nomination, there's not really anything much in the script that allows for them to really dig deep, except for in the film's final moments. It's especially sweet to know that these two performers married in real life in 2021 though - they sell the love story, so that even though they've just met, you understand why Harry comes back for her when he'd be forgiven for just taking off.
Along the way, these characters come across many people playing small parts. Denise Crosby I've mentioned. Mykelti Williamson (billed as Mykel T. Williamson - obviously somebody wrote that down while on the phone with him) plays a thief that Harry hijacks and forces to drive him places. It rankles a little that the part for the black actor here was as a thief, but at the time this was pretty common. Both Harry and this character come across Eddie Bunker, which perked my interest, and they participate in a scene where two cops burn alive - really creating a sense of whiplash, for this started out as a cute love story.
Robocop's Robert DoQui plays the chef at the diner. The ever-recognizable O-Lan Jones plays a waitress. The equally recognizable character actor Kurt Fuller shows up on the helicopter pad, and features in a controversial moment late. Earl Boen, the ever-present psychologist in the
Terminator franchise is one of the diners. Brian Thompson is a buffed-up helicopter pilot. It's always pleasant having recognizable faces show up in a film, and this one is treasure trove of 1980s bit-players.
Steve De Jarnatt's script for this became a well-known piece of property during the 1980s, and studios wanted to produce what would have been a toned down version of what he wrote. De Jarnatt was painfully aware of what that would mean to the whole concept, and at one stage bought the option back so he'd have the opportunity to make it himself, and stay true to the ending and tone. John Daly eventually decided to produce, in what would be a difficult, drawn-out process, for $3.7 million - so when necessary reshoots and adjustments didn't fit within Daly's budget, De Jarnatt himself would pay the bills and fight every step of the way. The screenplay was finished in the early 80s, and the film was eventually released in May 1989, an almost decade-long process to see out someone's artistic vision without any interference from anyone else. This impacted Steve De Jarnatt in a way which made him non-prolific in the industry, only directing two features among other screenwriting and directing for television.
The cinematography was performed by Dutch director of photography Theo van de Sande and is given an eye-catching style and artistry at times which would satisfy those who want something more than shot-reverse-shot and static filmmaking. The real attention grabbers though are Tangerine Dream, who gave
Miracle Mile it's electronically pulsating score - a factor which succeeds more than any other aspect of the film. You'd be forgiven (or, more accurately, admired) for getting the album and playing it during your rush hour commute - the sense of urgency which infects society as a whole is rhythmically tuned into, and every beat accelerates to various synthetic sounds and instruments. When thinking back on the film, it's with Tangerine Dream's magnetic fast-paced music at the forefront every time, and it compliments this movie to a perfect degree. Tangerine Dream had most notably scored
Sorcerer and remained a source of cinematic musical accompaniment for a considerable time, giving us music for
Risky Business,
Thief,
Legend,
Firestarter and
Near Dark.
Miracle Mile is a good example of a film which plays out in real time, at least from the moment where Harry discovers there's little more than an hour left according to his providential phone call. From there on out everything slides steadily in the direction of surrealism, which mirrors how our characters would really be feeling - from all night gyms to night-time strolls with your girl slumped in a shopping trolley, the film keeps up it's pace well. It manages to insert emotional cues, with Julie's grandparents (played by Lou Hancock and John Agar) being re-united after an extended period separated, but whisked away from Julie just at a time she'd like to be close to them. Harry would almost have to feel a sense of guilt, especially when we consider the possibility that the phone call he received might not be genuine. Panic is spreading, instigated by him - could all this be Harry's fault? Is he a proverbial Chicken Little? At a certain stage in the film, people have died, so when Harry and Julie stop to consider that the missiles may not be coming after all, you almost hope they do.
I'm probably underselling Edwards and Winningham when I compare their performances to Oscar-winning ones, for they do have an emotional journey. Theirs is a love life on fast forward (it's easy to profess life-long love when your life expectancy is measured in minutes) but it's a love fettered by fear and anxiety. This is a strange love story, but I enjoy anything that's strange and unusual - especially if it comes from the 1980s and is infected with recognizable 80s trademarks, fashion-wise, actor-wise, music-wise and culture-wise. There's even that one moment of gratuitous nudity, which comes out of the blue. When the movie was released it competed with
Road House at the box office for a few weeks, and was then crushed when
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. After nearly a decade of work, that seems wrong, but films get a chance to live on in this era and I'm happy I got to take a look at it and experience it. This is one film that passed me by at the time, and that I've only found out about now.
At a casual glance, I didn't realise that this film would be about nuclear catastrophe. Way back before De Jarnatt had backing it was going to provide a stand-alone plot for
The Twilight Zone movie which was just about to be given the green light - and the finished film does have that
Twilight Zone feel about it. The show did have many entries related to various apocalyptic scenarios. The tone we end up with by the end is the same one you'd feel when things became strange on that show, and I'm glad we ended up with a version that wasn't messed around with and given a 'Hollywood' ending, or featured 'Hollywood' actors. I really wish that De Jarnatt had of had an easier time of it though, and I really wish he'd had the kind of career where we'd get to experience a lot more of his films. It maddens me to think that filmmakers like this are so discouraged, and other less talented ones have longer careers just because they accept interference with their films - interference which usually makes for worse movies in the end. I think
Miracle Mile would have been even better with a budget that at least allowed for what De Jarnatt wanted to do, and didn't have him struggling so hard to make changes and finish it. It's a real labor of love though, and a film I think people will always by interested in seeing and talking about.