Bad acting be damned. The Night Before is more than a guilty pleasure. It is a classic.
USA
4*
Director:
Thom Eberhardt
Screenwriters:
Gregory Scherick
Thom Eberhardt
Director of Photography:
Ron Garcia
Running time: 85 minutes
There once was a time when Keanu Reeves was a bit of a dork. Not the actor, but his characters. Although in the minds of most viewers, the line has always been a bit blurred. He is as much Neo as he is John Wick as he is the second half of the unforgettable duo that is Bill & Ted. Keanu (because nobody refers to him as “Reeves”) has played some iconic roles over the years, but the main reason for this muddled boundary is that he is not much of an actor – at least, not one who produces speech in a natural way. As a result, his various performances have been remarkably similar in expression.
The Night Before was among his very first films and the one in which he made his début as a leading man. This mostly farcical production fits his adorkable line delivery and excessive hand movements to a T. But despite the laid-back nature of this pretty derisory undertaking, it should be regarded as a high point of Keanu’s career because it is so consistent in its wackiness.
His character, Winston, is a nerdy senior in high school whose biggest achievement is being vice-president of the Astronomy Club. Two of the coolest girls in school made a bet, and the one who loses is punished by having to go to the prom – and, worst of all, be seen in public – with Winston. That lucky girl is Tara Mitchell (Lori Loughlin), the daughter of a very protective single dad who is also an ominously cool-as-a-cucumber police captain. Naturally, the traditional “chat” between the date and the father involves a shotgun.
But The Night Before opens after the prom has already ended, and we never even get to the prom. One reason is the action itself: Winston gets off the highway too early and loses his way in an unseemly part of downtown Los Angeles. The other reason is structural: The film is a cleverly assembled mixture of quirky flashbacks triggered by a verbal or a visual cue in the present. But there is no way the prom was even a fraction as exciting as what Winston and Tara get to experience.
It all starts long after sunset, when Winston wakes up in a dark alley dressed in a white jacket and a pink carnation, just as a truck is about to (and then does) drive over him. He has no idea how he got there. This amnesia takes a while to shake off as he slowly pieces together the events that led up to him alone in the middle of the night without his wallet or his car keys, but $1,400 stuffed deep into his jacket.
While asking around, he quickly learns that he has to meet the local crime boss, “Tito”, at dawn, where they will have it out over… something. This impending doom imbues the entire film, comical as the events sometimes are, with a foreboding feeling of danger and dread, even as Winston (always awkwardly but, somehow, usually successfully) evades countless obstacles in his way. He also realises Tara has disappeared, and he doesn’t remember dropping her off at home, which means her father will have a bullet with his name on it.
A string of bad decisions – from Winston unwittingly helping a thief steal his car to him mistakenly selling Tara to a pimp – lead to the night unfolding as a horror show that the two teenagers take in their stride. They are either fearless or insane, and by the looks of things, these two options are not mutually exclusive. When a bartender overtly pockets Tara’s credit card before shuffling off, she blithely responds to no one in particular, “Well, there goes my credit rating…(!)” And when she is stuffed into the trunk, she is more worried about her silk dress getting ruined than the fact that she is about to be trafficked. Lori Loughlin plays this role of an airhead high school princess, who is indifferent to danger because she has always lived in a protective cocoon, exquisitely.
The night-time setting is remarkably seedy, and almost every character in both the present and the recent past (the flashbacks from earlier that night) either is a criminal, has criminal tendencies or gives off a vibe that has us grabbing our wallet to make sure it is still there. The Night Before particularly maligns its black characters: With a lone exception, every single one is some shade of a crook.
But it is the unexpected Proustian “madeleines” – those sensory triggers that evoke a particular memory – that stitch the plot’s two timelines together in a perfectly suited comical fashion and create a synthesis that is also an impetus constantly pushing the story forward. These bits of connecting tissue are very potent tools in a filmmaker’s toolbox, as Stephen Daldry proved in the opening credits of The Hours, which created visual links between three stories. Here, the moments are admittedly much less sophisticated but equally successful at establishing strong and memorable ties between the past and the present, thereby illuminating our (and Winston’s) understanding of his predicament.
The flashbacks are filled with such entertaining characters and events that we care little about the major plot hole: Locating the exact moment about halfway through the film where the flashbacks finally catch up with the film’s opening scene is not as easy as one would hope. But the reason this closure is lacking is that the film is always rushing full-speed ahead towards dawn, with the events around Winston quickly spiralling out of control as we reach the final act.
No one would have guessed Proust would make an appearance in a review of a Keanu Reeves film. Then again, many a Keanu film exists on a plane of existence that transcends that of its peers. The Night Before is serious yet ridiculous, clever yet superficial. And unlike many a comedy from the same period, the humour hasn’t aged a bit. (If you haven’t watched Wayne’s World in a while, try again and see whether you can call it anything other than cringeworthy.) Held together by performances that, if tweaked just a little bit, might have been unbearable, the film has a rhythm all its own and surpasses its respectable but staid counterparts, like those of John Hughes.