The Last Kiss

2/4 stars

This is the second film I've seen starring Zach Braff, and surprisingly is far inferior to his earlier work, 2004's Garden State. In that movie, Braff was writer, director and lead, and the result was a middling and formulaic "indie" genre film that seemed to confirm his status as a novice. I would have thought that a different director and a script by eminent writer Paul Haggis would be an improvement. Unfortunately for Braff fans and non-fans alike, this is not the case.

Like Garden State, this is an attempt at an introspective film that comes off as melodramatic due to a lack of veracity. Braff plays Michael, who is in a happy relationship but is bombarded (along with the audience) by images of couples who are unhappy more due to incivility than misunderstanding (as if happy couples ought to be worried by this). When he meets Kim (Rachel Bilson) the two of them have an affair seemingly because he is too passive to avoid it. The film attempts to remind us of the idea that new romances always seem more appealing than familiar ones at first, but is far too heavy-handed in doing so: the interior of each established relationship we see is hellish, whereas the escape represented by Kim crosses the line from idealistic into adolescent fantasy. The power of the film is in the sexual release that her character represents, but the film confuses it for an emotional one. I'm as big a fan of graphic sex and foul language as anyone, but I've never seen a film where they seem more obligatory than in The Last Kiss.

The real shame here is all the wasted talent. Braff and Bilson both have strong TV backgrounds, Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner are established veterans, and Casey Affleck has been highly acclaimed for his recent work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone. Here they all read dialogue that insults them as actors, the worst I've ever seen from Paul Haggis. The soundtrack is good, but seems designed more to impress music geeks than to function as a part of the film (speaking as a music geek, we hate that) and in fact often clashes with the scenes where it is used. There is a shameless scene late in the film where Kim presents a mix cd in an attempt to impress Michael, and in that moment becomes a figure of foolishness and emotional immaturity. Braff designed this soundtrack (as he did the one for Garden State) in an attempt to impress a music savvy audience. What then, are we to think of him?