Miracle Mile
Director & writer ~ Steve De Jarnatt
1988, USA
Stars ~ Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar
On the mean, dayglo streets of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City”, a guy is just trying to get his Meet Cute when he answers the wrong public phone and stumbles onto the news that nuclear Armageddon is imminent. I mean, it’s the movies and the Eighties so he’ll still risk everything for a crush he barely knows, and things will turn explosive and criminal very quickly, however unlikely.
Having grown up in the Eighties, I can testify that the fear of Them dropping the bomb was very real, and all over the music hits of the era. Films: ‘Damnation Alley’, ‘Escape From New York’, ‘The Quiet Earth’, ‘Dreamscape’, ‘Mad Max 2’, ‘Mad Max: Thunderdome’, ‘A Boy and His Dog’, ‘Zardoz’, ‘Silent Running’, ‘When the Wind Blows’, etc, and these are just the ones I was familiar with. The Cold War fears of the Sixties bled effortlessly into the Seventies and found their natural bleak-peak in 1984’s ‘Threads’. There was plenty of “Hey, what if the apocalypse was: monsters! Action! Aliens! Zombies! Old people!”, so why not a Meet Cute in Armageddon? John Hughes does the Holocaust?
And in that way, despite the insistence that there will be late night crime involved, ‘Miracle Mile’ takes a different tone, trying to reach for sadness over the era’s colour scheme and superficiality. And just when you think it cannot be anymore Eighties, ‘Miracle Mile’s striking, hypnotic score is by Tangerine Dream, whose soundtrack work of this era endows many a film with an irresistible dream-like veneer. There’s certainly a dreaminess to this romantic apocalyptic nightmare drama, with oddball side-characters, brick-size mobiles, and a race-against-time propelled by explosions and death long before the bomb is dropped. The angle is a male rescuing an imperilled girl he barely knows, whilst trying to keep her in the dark, which is a little on the condescending side. JB Spooky speaks of how the opening five minutes remind him of High School flirtations, but we’re dealing with a thirtysomething protagonist here, but it goes on to feel like an adolescent obsession. Luckily, Anthony Edwards is appealing, and baffled enough as things escalate into unlikely “Vice City” territory. Mare Winningham, although saddled with the most dated mullet, is sweet but a slight presence.
The attempt to make this most fatalistic and downbeat of premises a most exciting experience makes for a fluctuating tone that gives it distinctive character, but wavers in credibility. Those that are convinced tag the thin romance idealism as its core. The Los Angeles nightlife proves a vibrant backdrop as the film careens to an inevitable conclusion, still clinging onto a last hope of fantasy of connection as humanity puts paid to itself.
