THE LAST SUPPER
A film review by Joan Ellis
Copyright 1996 Nebbadoon Syndicate
"The Last Supper" is the perfect title for this sardonic comedy. A group of self-satisfied grad students gathers on Sunday nights to discuss the fine points of issues on which they all agree. Since they have yet to engage real life on any level, they are free to wallow in the untested smugness of their academic theories. They are young liberals.
Their habit is to invite an alien thinker to stir the pot at their Sunday suppers. When fate deposits a monstrous bigot at the table, the pot comes to a full boil that ends in murder. Faced with an act unimaginable to their humanist sensibilities just a moment earlier, the students analyze their options much as they might the pros and cons of going into Bosnia.
Call the police? Claim self-defense? Bury him in the backyard? Quickly, they decide that sacrificing superior intellect to a jail term for killing an unworthy facist is not an option. At this point, the movie takes an abrupt turn into black humor as the now practiced murderers invite an increasingly outrageous stream of right-wing zealots to share their table before dispatching them to the backyard to fertilize their tomatoes.
Freed from the suspense of a serious thriller, we ponder the theoretical questions flying around the screen and laugh nervously at the comic calm that accompanies the ritual murders. We enjoy the choice of murder weapon that establishes collective guilt, but watching guests and hosts imprisoned in their own rectitude is not the fluffy fun of Agatha Christie.
A reverend intones that "homosexuality is the disease, and AIDS is the cure." Another posits that women invite rape, another that the homeless must "know their place." The anti-environmentalist crows, "If the spotted owl's time is up..." They smart just a little when a young conservative attacks: "It's your generation's morality that has put my generation at risk."
Oblivious to what they are doing in the name of higher cause, the graduate students continue to dissect the hypotheticals that feed their egos: Would you have killed Hitler before he became Hitler? At what point is it O.K. to kill someone who is becoming an evil force on this planet? Blind to any idea that is not their own, these budding intellects are arrogant hypocrits who toast themselves for "making the world a better place and making a difference...we wouldn't kill anyone unless we couldn't change their minds."
Director Stacy Title and his crew have a very good time using the ugly extremes of conservative zealotry to skewer the self-righteousness of liberal piety. Cameron Diaz, Bill Paxton, Jason Alexander, Mark Harmon, and Annabeth Gish manage to mock extemism in any form.
We are reminded that the student who says, "We're liberals; we do the right thing," usually grows up to be a conservative, while the student who consistently tries to do the right thing grows up to be the conscience of democracy.
Film Critic : JOAN ELLIS Word Count : 493 Studio : Sony Pictures Rating : R Running Time: 1h32m
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