Miracle Mile

This slice of surreal Eighties cinema seems custom made to invoke conflicting feelings in regard to relative quality. The clunky script is peppered with curious non sequiturs and leaps in logic. Dated doesn’t even begin to describe the look and mood. But the sizeable list of faults folds up curiously into a viewing experience that is hard to shake. In an odd way, Miracle Mile is a West Coast counterpart to Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. The plot plays out in much the same fashion: boy meets girl, boy chases girl, and boy loses girl, all within a fish-out-of-water urban milieu. The difference comes with the central conceit, one that amplifies the story arc to apocalyptic proportions.

Anthony Edwards plays Harry Washello, a twenty something trad jazz trombonist, with typically bemused befuddlement. Visiting Los Angeles for a gig, he spends his off hours at a natural history museum located near the La Brea Tar Pits. There he encounters Mare Winngham’s Julie, a vaguely punk rock/New Wave waif who looks the spitting image of Ziggy Stardust’s sister. It’s a case of fledgling love at first sight. The pair shares a few magical hours together, but their courtship is cut short by the start of Julie’s waitress shift a Johnnie’s Diner (a local landmark). Harry suggests that they reconvene when she gets off and reluctantly returns to his hotel for a nap. Fate has other designs as a discarded cigarette leads circuitously to a short circuited alarm clock. Arriving back at the diner several hours late and discovering Julie long gone, Harry despairs. Picking up a chance call on the pay phone outside, his entire life (as well as those of the other diner patrons) changes irrevocably.

The film’s catalyst is a good one: a wrong number from a missile silo forewarning that a little over an hour remains before the West Coast is consumed in nuclear conflagration. Harry initially considers it a crank, but events converge that begin to dispel his doubts. What follows transpires with dream-like logic as the minutes on the clock tick inexorably by. Harry’s quest to reunite with Julie and secure safety for them both is beset by a darkly comic string of setbacks. Quirky humor is colored with strikingly dissonant explosions of violence. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack also aids immeasurably in this regard, relying on layered synth tones that mirror the early morning alieness of the city and a multiplying sense of dread.

Director Steve De Jarnatt deals strangely with the elements of time and perspective. An opening montage optimistically recounts the evolution of humankind from sea-dwelling amoeba to bipedal mammal, only to be revealed as a stock museum short. Eras and styles converge and conflict. The kitsch interiors of Johnny’s Diner contrast with the steel and concrete of adjacent skyscrapers. Harry’s vocation and an intimated fondness for vintage RKO films stands starkly against the ennui and impersonality of modern L.A. The fossil preserving tar pits serve as starting point and terminus. Weird stereotypes also abound, perhaps most egregiously in a segment set in an early hours gym constructed of neon and glass, the hairsprayed Spandex-sheathed occupants looking like hellish extras from an Olivia Newton John video. The final reel delivers on the tension and unease depicted in these fomenting incongruities. It does so with an uncompromising denouement that brings the underlying truth contained in that stage setting museum short harrowingly home. This is definitely a filmic example of the whole surpassing the sum of the parts, an artifact of an earlier era that still resonates potently regardless of the passage of time.