In the classic definition of a masterpiece—a work created to establish one’s status as an artisan worthy of recognition as a first-rank creator—the movie “Nothing Lasts Forever” fits the bill perfectly. It should have propelled its writer and director, Tom Schiller, into the front rank of directors, or at least announced him as one of the most original younger filmmakers working at the time. Instead, the movie, scheduled for release in 1984, went unreleased by the studio that produced it, M-G-M, and Schiller kept his day job—making short films for “Saturday Night Live”—and went on to make commercials. He should have won acclaim for that film—and its lack of a release, as well as the obscurity in which it unjustly remains today, is a loss to the world of movies, to viewers, and to the evolution of the art.
“Nothing Lasts Forever” (which has been screened in the U.S. only on rare occasions) is sort of available now via streaming (do the search), and it’s a revelation, a delight, and a shock. It was filmed in 1982, at which time Guy Maddin hadn’t yet made a feature, the Coen brothers were a year away from shooting “Blood Simple,” and Wes Anderson was turning thirteen, but it’s a film that’s worthy of mention as an equal of those filmmakers’ first movies, as well as an anticipation of their ideas, methods, and styles.
The hardest thing about pastiche is to duplicate the style and tone of the original without falling into parody—without the self-satisfying notion of superiority to an earlier age of artifice, as if only the past had style whereas the present day has a neutral, natural universality. Schiller’s film is a brilliant pastiche, based on confident youth-on-the-rise films of the forties, of which M-G-M was a major purveyor. It’s a sort of cosmo-romantic science-fantasy that borrows cinematic styles of the forties to tell a story of the early sixties that’s anchored by icons of the fifties—and, in so doing, to reveal something crucial about the eighties.
Schiller knowingly, lovingly, subtly yet riotously meshes these classic styles at every level of the movie. The silver-tinged, lustrously shadowed black-and-white cinematography, by Fred Schuler, yields images that feel projector-aged from the start. Howard Shore’s musical score is a miracle of time-impersonation, and the performances—by a cast that features many actors who, themselves, were of that vintage (including Imogene Coca and Eddie Fisher, playing himself)—mix a cheerful simplicity with a period stillness and gestural precision. The giddily curated décor foreshadows Anderson’s meticulously evocative iconography. And, above all, the movie involves a surgically precise collage of Schiller’s own dramatic material with archival footage, whether setting the action in context or providing quietly hysterical asides by way of framed and embedded references from the history of cinema—including a clip from D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” that is treated as documentary footage, as well as a sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” that plays a peculiar role in a love scene. (The difficulty of getting clearance for some of that footage has something to do with the difficulty in releasing the film on home video.)
As for the story, it borrows from a wide range of genres, too, which it mashes up (before there was such a thing) with a breezy and breathtaking audacity. The wide-eyed, curly-haired protagonist, Adam Beckett (Zach Galligan), is a classical pianist with an ardent audience for his Carnegie Hall concert—an all-Chopin recital—but he’s both more and less than a virtuoso. A deep and true artist in his soul, he’s also a guilt-ridden fraud in practice, and when his scheme is exposed, he takes off on a solitary trip of penance.
He returns to find New York a changed city. In the chaos of a “hundred-day strike” (shades of the newspaper strike of 1962-63), the Port Authority is the emergency government, checking passports at crossings and giving Adam only provisional residence, contingent upon his proving himself as an artist—in two days. (The test, which involves life drawing, is a scene of quietly ribald comic genius.) He moves in with his swinging, bourgeois aunt and uncle but moves out quickly, to a seedy studio of aesthetic secrets.
Ordered by the Port Authority to take a risible day job—in the Holland Tunnel—Adam meets Mara (Apollonia van Ravenstein), another artist in exile, in a scene of hallucinatory cuteness involving a gas mask, and he follows her into the city’s bohemian underground. Espresso and an antically tilted table play major roles, and a love affair begins, but Adam's artistic identity remains as inchoate as ever, until he helps a homeless man who then takes a shine to him. The result is a visionary, Oz-like interlude—as if Clarence, of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” had brought George Bailey to see the world from the angelic point of view—that leads to (spoiler alert, but it's too delicious to withhold) a bus ride to the Moon, where Adam discovers the core of his artistic calling (and comes into conflict with the vehicle’s sententious steward, played with contained glee by Bill Murray).
Schiller goes the long way to tell a story of downfall and redemption, of a young person who is a sellout from the very start and has to find his way to artistic honesty on a difficult road in a hostile place. Adam’s adventures range from the mercenary to the metaphysical, from the urban jungle’s social frenzy and political clangor to the menacing allure of its architectural byways, from eros and ambition to the mystical pursuit of transcendent visions. If some of the solutions that give rise to a happy ending seem a little rapid and a little pat, that’s in part because it’s a movie that could happily spin out variations ad infinitum, and in part because that’s what happy endings are.
At a time when the new President, Ronald Reagan, was a living object of nostalgia for lost verities, and when the increasing media blare was blurring the terms of art and integrity, Schiller turned to the charismatic styles and forms of earlier times. What he found there was a far stranger and wilder world, a society more overtly formal yet more secretly chaotic than the wistful prelapsarian visions that Reagan and the new Hollywood restoration were selling. In exploring the mad moods arising from the heritage of classic movies and from memories and artifacts of recent history, Schiller seemed to be delving into the collective American psyche, and into his own. For all its antic comedy, “Nothing Lasts Forever” feels like both an artistic archeology and a self-analysis.
In a way, the ending of the movie is Schiller’s own ending—his own leap ahead and artistic triumph. But life didn’t completely follow art. “Nothing Lasts Forever” is miraculous in its style and compositional wizardry. Schiller’s frames teem with eye-catching action, and his understated attention to offhanded gestures and odd, arresting interpolations is the comedy director’s equivalent of perfect pitch. The movie should have launched Schiller into the industry, into the discussion, into the cinematic vernacular of the times. Instead, he ended up a harbinger, a mineshaft canary of a neoclassical moment. The air was being sucked out by such conservatively nostalgic retro-directors as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. It took a burst of independent filmmaking to break through to the other side; but it proved no help to Schiller.
