Screen Machine

Review: The Last Song

I’ve got a crush, a big fat one. I’m in love with Miley Cyrus. I want to be her sister, her best friend and lover all at once. I love everything: the ridiculous hair extensions, the big American smile, the dance routines. Most of all, I love her cheesy American teen show, Hannah Montana. Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, an all American girl who has a secret life as a famous popstar (Hannah Montana). She keeps this secret efficiently through the use of a blonde wig and a super trendy wardrobe, which is always hyper accessorised in great Disney style. What’s not to love in this brilliantly executed children’s show? I can escape completely with it. But what’s great about Cyrus is not only her role as Hannah. She has a fantastic music career with bouncy hits like “Party in the USA”, “See You Again” and the moving ballad “The Climb”. She’s a super fun, teen bubblegum frenzy of glitter, gloss and studded platform shoes.

Perhaps what I love most about Cyrus is that her fame and personal life are tightly intertwined. You can’t separate the famous exterior from the inner core. She’s not a deep, philosophical type – most of the conversations she has in her interviews involve boys, shoes and her upcoming album – but she does insist on challenging stereotypes and contributing to various charity groups, like To Write Love on Her Arms and Youth Service America. On top of this, she holds herself tight-lipped in the midst of a frenzy of sexual scandals like the outrage over her (very innocent) pole-dancing performance at the VMA’s, or the huge backlash that followed Annie Leibovitz’s famous photograph of her clad in a white sheet, staring into the lens of the camera, open-mouthed with a virginal pout and primeval expression. Cyrus isn’t so ’squeaky clean,’ but it’s not a bad thing. It’s a great and fun combination of teen pop star and real girl – presenting herself to the world as an emerging woman.

You must be wondering (dear reader) what I, a PhD student in film studies, am doing coveting the world of a teen pop star. Am I not meant to be analysing (and enjoying) only the serious, critically worthy cinematic efforts that capture the attention of likeminded intellectuals? *Yawn* This belongs to what Adrian Martin likes to term “The Criterion Effect,” a condition that renders intellectuals incapable of acknowledging anything outside the sphere of art cinema. How boring! I like Cyrus, I escape with her into the great, glossy teen queen world she inhabits. That she exposes her sexual maturation and undeveloped teenage psyche only furthers my interest. As a young woman who has only just escaped from the depths of a horrifying adolescence, knowing the truths about the exposure of supposedly excessive sexuality makes me want to call up Michel Foucault’s ghost and fight against the uproar that follows her every sexual move.

What would Foucault say about all this middle class, critical madness? I bet he would love her. That she has created her own neat discourse of Disney-afied creation combined with teenage angst and overt American sensibility is something I am quite sure he would find to be most brilliant. Is it not OK for me to enjoy this? I abhor the fact that, to many, only children should be enjoying her (sex)capades – at a supervised distance, of course.

In the middle of all this critical madness, how can I, a self-confessed fan, enter a (Hoyts…eek!) cinema and attempt to analyse Miley’s latest film, The Last Song, with the same passionate fervour that characterises my critique of her delightfully saturated musical and televisual performances? The Last Song is Cyrus’ first attempt at a ‘big time’ film. It is co-written by Nicholas Sparks (author of horrifying, nauseating romances such as The Notebook and Dear John). Cyrus, with her wonderfully expressive demeanour, does reasonably well at tackling a terribly weighty story. It is the plot and cinematic technique which render the film virtually unwatchable.

Essentially, it is meant to be a tale of a teenage girl, Ronnie (played by Cyrus) who returns to her father’s house for the summer to visit him for the first time since he divorced her mother. The character of Ronnie is many things: musically gifted, angry, rebellious, beautiful – and, on another level, somewhat conservative (she refuses alcohol and does not have sex with her boyfriend, Will, played by Liam Hensworth). Like all the characters in the film, her development is jerky and without insight or explanation. The film opens quite abruptly in this sense, with little introduction – we see Cyrus entering the house with her small brother Jonah (Bobby Coleman) as they meet with their father for what, we are left to assume, is their first meeting with him in several years. Cyrus does an impressive job of playing a rebellious teen and for the first thirty minutes, The Last Song is a pleasant slice-of-life look at family relations. The camera and cinematography are non-expressive in the usual Hollywood style – it’s all close-ups and reverse angle shots but despite Cyrus & co being left alone to give the film any merit, it is quite moving in a small, unadulterated way.

Alas, Sparks could not leave the narrative to explore the simple charms of family life, and so subplots begin, one after the other. Something truly awful is happening in Hollywood. A terrible condition has rendered screenwriters obsessed with creating plot lines so dense, romantic films have become like long episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful. The Last Song is one great example of this – a bizarre collection of events that unfurl without adequate motivation or explanation, which are filmed in such a clichéd fashion, that at my screening the audience was literally laughing at every ‘moving’ moment the film continuously (by this I mean at least every 30 seconds) regurgitated across the screen. I found myself sliding between feeling humoured, bored and slightly depressed. I wanted to reach out to the screen, grab Cyrus by the hand and shake her forcefully for allowing herself to be cast in such a saturated, overbearing film.

Sadly, the debacle of The Last Song and its deserved poor critical reception could mean Cyrus’ talent is drowned in a sea of criticism, Hollywood overindulgence and public shaming for the exposure of her vulnerable sexuality. I was reminded of this in the film when Ronnie begins to play piano at her father’s funeral service. She is a skilled musician, but we are only given a glimpse of her talent because the sound of her hitting the piano chords is quickly drowned out with a non-diegetic orchestral onslaught that left me overwhelmed with sympathy for this starlet. Hopefully this is the last we see of Miley drowning in this sea of madness!

Lauren is a PhD student in Film & Television studies at Monash University, specialising in the representation of pregnancy in cinema.

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