
Kino Lorber
Armageddon is the Pits
The first time I watched Miracle Mile, I kind of got obsessed with it.
It was the first movie I ever saw in a sub-sub-genre I’ve since come to think of as 80s Paranoia Trips. The typical example—my list includes After Hours, Vampire’s Kiss and Near Dark, with O Lucky Man! as an early prototype, Blue Velvet as an acknowledged masterpiece, and Falling Down as an early 90s swan song—are basically gender-flipped versions of Alice in Wonderland.
They revolve around a young male protagonist who is struggling to stay sane inside insanity, but just can’t crawl back out of whatever rabbit hole he’s fallen into. These tend to be micro-budget films, often shot at night to save money, based on scripts that development people love but rarely greenlight because they’re just plain weird.
The prevailing tone is a sadistic quirkiness, where you try to laugh at the freak show but can’t because the tension is never released. The protagonists tend to come to bad ends unless some studio exec forces the writer to deus-ex-machina a happy ending. There’s usually a girl. You could say that Miracle Mile has the most upbeat ending because its hero, Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards), manages to retain his humanity and actually gets the girl, which is saying a lot considering that it all ends in nuclear annihilation.
I got obsessed with Miracle Mile because, having just arrived in Los Angeles, I felt like I was Harry Washello.
I was young and naïve and I spent a lot of time hanging out at the Miracle Mile; a few years later I would live there. One of the first of many good things I have to say about Miracle Mile is that it really knows its setting.
Back when Johnie’s Coffee Shop was an actual working diner and the May Company was still a department store, the Miracle Mile had its own vibe, which I would have to describe as trapped in time: only you’re never entirely sure what time that is. Its geographic and psychic midpoint is the La Brea Tar Pits, where the skeletons of mastodons and dire wolves are literally trapped for eternity. This is where Miracle Mile begins and ends, and it casts a sense of place over the film that writer-director Steve De Jarnatt completely inhabits.
It starts out as sunny as any movie possibly can, with Harry meeting his dream girl Julie (an 80s-gamine Mare Winningham), spending the afternoon with her, charming her while playing his trombone as part of a retro-big band orchestra at the (now sadly departed) Pan Pacific Theatre. He meets her grandparents at Park La Brea. Harry and Julie make plans to meet later, and she assures him in no uncertain terms that she’s a sure thing. If Harry had died that day he would have died happy—then again, he does die happy that day, as happy as he’s going to get.
Harry takes a nap but his power goes out and his alarm doesn’t go off. Julie thinks he’s stood her up, takes a valium and goes to bed. Harry goes to the apartment where she works with a bunch of flowers.
Then the payphone rings. He picks it up. A soldier on the other end, thinking he’s talking to his father, tells Harry that nuclear war is about to begin. The soldier is silenced in a noise of automatic gunfire. And another voice tells Harry to forget everything he heard and go back to sleep.
Harry doesn’t: he tells the other people in the diner, and from here on out Miracle Mile is mainly a litmus test of what people do when they’re staring down the end of the world. A buttoned-up executive with heavy national security ties (a post-TNG Denise Crosby) makes a few calls on her ginormous 80s cell phone, confirms the call is legit, and arranges a helicopter to take her and the rest of the late-night diner crowd to a plane that will supposedly hustle them all to a safe location.
Harry doesn’t go with them because he has to find Julie, because he’s decided she’s the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Such ironies are rife in Miracle Mile. His desperate struggle to get to Julie and get her on that helicopter leads him down dark paths. He carjacks a stereo thief (a very young Mikelti Williamson), accidentally triggers the deaths of two police officers, and sets off a panicked mob as he searches for a helicopter pilot in the most 80s fitness club since John Travolta did aerobics with Jamie Lee Curtis in Perfect. Julie appears occasionally, elusively, like Alice’s White Rabbit. And dawn approaches.
Most of Miracle Mile plays out in real time, in a single setting, following a single plotline and never cutting away from its protagonist: it’s not often that you get to see a movie that obeys all the Aristotelian unities. All of this drives heavy claustrophobia as the metaphorical walls close in on Harry and Julie. In spite of this sense of impending doom, Miracle Mile actually has a lot of funny moments. Funny in that 80s-paranoia-trip way where people are constantly showing their freak side. Two of the diner patrons start making a list of everyone they want to save from Armageddon: it includes Linus Pauling, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Harry Belafonte, and 60s comedian Dick Gregory. Later, a very wasted yuppie (Kurt Fuller) brags that he “ate the drugstore” and hopes to God that tremor really was a nuclear missile, because he better not have fried his brain over an earthquake.
De Jarnatt’s writing is the star of Miracle Mile. With a budget that razor-thin—he had to pay for the last two days of shooting out of his own pocket—the screenplay had to be insanely good, and it was. The same is true for the cast. Edwards and Winningham have awesome chemistry as the tragic couple (they’d later marry in real life). The supporting players are a lineup of that-guy 80s character actors—O-Lan Jones (Edward Scissorhands), Earl Boen (The Terminator), Robert DoQui (Robocop), Claude Earl Jones (Cherry 2000), and Kelly Jo Mintner (The Lost Boys)—all of them owning whatever scene they happen to be in.
Extras are plentiful with multiple commentary tracks, short films, audio recordings, featurettes, interviews, photo montage and alternate ending.
Watching Miracle Mile again after several decades, I can see how it’s aged. This isn’t a bad thing: It’s a Wonderful Life has aged like hell and we still love it. But it’s not a movie that could be made today (I’m not entirely sure it’s a movie that could have been made then: MGM marketed it as a thriller with the tagline “There are 70 minutes to the end of the world. Where can you hide?”). Fears of nuclear war haven’t exactly gone out of style, but they’re no longer the star of our nightmares. Many of the landmarks that once defined the Miracle Mile have vanished or completely transformed. Between Marvel blockbusters and Netflix throwaways, there isn’t much of a market for smart, hard-to-categorize low-budget gems.
Mostly, though, it’s the tone of Miracle Mile that would be impossible to reproduce in today’s cinematic universe. There’s an earnestness that underpins the movie’s ironic surface—it’s basically boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy dies with girl. A lot of movies from that era were earnest in a way that’s deeply unfashionable in our meta-commenting age. Like The Terminator and Robocop, Miracle Mile often pokes fun at the times but it doesn’t poke fun at itself. The tone never gets so over-the-top crazy that you forget these people are fighting desperately to stay alive.
Today, Miracle Mile would be forced to pick a lane. It would either have to be an over-muscled video game like World War Z or a self-aware irony fest like Don’t Look Up. It might even be forced to adopt the happy ending that MGM tried to force on it. Which would be a mistake, because it’s maybe the most heartwarming unhappy ending I’ve ever seen.


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