BY TIM GREAVES
The
year 1987 saw the release of director Steve De Jarnatt’s debut feature, Cherry
2000, an actioner planted in a dystopian future. A strong headlining
performance from Melanie Griffith aside, it’s not a particularly remarkable
film, but I liked it when I first saw it and still do. However, De Jarnatt’s
second offering, which he also wrote, is a different beast altogether: A unique
and intoxicating cinematic nightmare. Where else but in Miracle Mile can you
see a fledgling romance play out against the countdown to the apocalypse?
Whilst
strolling around a museum in Los Angeles, Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) and
Julie Peters (Mare Winninghan) cross paths several times. They get talking and
it’s evident there’s a mutual attraction between the two lonely hearts. Having
arranged an after-midnight date with Julie when her waitressing shift at an
all-night diner on L.A.’s Miracle Mile finishes, Harry decides to take a nap.
But his alarm fails to go off and he’s late – almost 4 hours late in fact.
Julie has unsurprisingly given up and gone home. He tries to call her from a
phone booth outside the diner but gets no reply. As he walks away the phone
rings and he returns to answer it. Believing Harry to be someone else, a
distraught man’s voice informs him he’s at a silo in North Dakota from where
nuclear missiles are set to be launched in less than an hour, with reprisals
targeting L.A. expected to follow minutes later...
Miracle
Mile’s opening scenes introduce its two instantly likeable protagonists and
swiftly lay out enough lightly comic trimmings that anyone going in blind could
easily be primed with expectation for a gentle rom-com. Indeed, we subsequently
follow the couple through a montage of first-date activity and Harry is
introduced to Julie’s beloved grandparents. But hold on, because things are
about to veer off into less comfortable territory. Following the aforementioned
telephone conversation – a couple of minutes during which the film’s tone darkens
quite dramatically – Harry goes into the diner and recounts what he’s just
heard to the motley assembly of patrons. In doing so he plants a seed that
quickly sprouts into a living nightmare. The sense of urgency builds at an
ever-increasing rate as the remainder of the film charts Harry’s race against
time to locate and get Julie to safety, encountering as he goes a succession of
quirky and dubious characters lurking on the night-shrouded streets of L.A.
With
the escalating tension driven by a hauntingly eloquent Tangerine Dream score, there’s
one burning question that propels the narrative: is what Harry was told during
that phone call for real or was it some sort of twisted hoax? Suffice to say
that as time ticks on and the sun begins to rise all hell breaks loose, with
politesse kicked into the dirt as panic-stricken people behave the way that panic-stricken
people do; cars filled with terrified citizens clog the streets out of the city
and there are glimpses of the animalistic manner in which the less conscionable
choose to spend what they perceive to be their last minutes on Earth. Worse
yet, as potential Armageddon fails to materialise when predicted, Harry begins
to fear that he – rather than any genuine impending threat – may have
inadvertently instigated all the madness, anxiously likening himself to Chicken
Little.
Now,
Miracle Mile may be touching 30 years old, but for the benefit of those
unfamiliar with the film I shall leave any further discussion about the plot
there.
Anthony
Edwards and Mare Winningham deliver splendidly endearing performances and
director Steve De Jarnatt invests just enough time establishing the romantic
thread at the outset that, as fate unrelentingly conspires to separate the
pair, the viewer is filled with an overwhelming desire to see them make it out
alive to pastures green. Although almost every other character in the story
appears only briefly, there are memorable turns from Mykelti Williamson as a trader
in knock-off hi-fi gear, John Agar and Lou Hancock as Julie’s grandparents and
Brian Thompson as a fitness freak who just may facilitate Harry and Julie’s salvation.