Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #74 Miracle Mile (1988)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Most patrons who choose this option decide to punish me for some manner of crime I must have committed in a previous life by making me watch something egregiously terrible even by my standards. 

Every once in a very long while, however, a patron decides to take pity on me and chooses a legitimately good to great motion picture I might never have seen without the payday or the assignment. 

That is the case with Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 apocalyptic thriller Miracle Mile. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Reagan-era cult classic but it took 43 years and a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 assignment for me to take the plunge.

Why do you keep talking about shrimp!?! This is a desperate situation!

With the Weird Accordion to Al book on the way I’m seeing everything through a “Weird Al” Yankovic prism these days, including the soul-consuming fear that we Americans were doomed to perish with the rest of humanity, and a whole bunch of lesser countries, in some manner of apocalyptic nuclear armageddon. 

Fear that the endgame for humanity would be Mutually Assured Destruction with our Soviet arch-enemies was certainly not unique to Miracle Mile or the 1980s songs of “Weird Al” Yankovic but it was a persistent theme in Al’s work throughout his first decade as a recording artist. 

I suspect that I would have seen Miracle Mile a lot sooner if it had starred anyone other than Anthony Edwards. I have nothing against Edwards. He is a fine dramatic and comedic actor skilled at playing everything from sidekicks to nerds to nerds who are also sidekicks to non-handsome doctors. 

But Anthony Edwards is nobody’s idea of a movie star, nor is he anyone’s conception of a leading man. Stick Edwards’ Top Gun co-star Tom Cruise in the lead role of a romantic jazzman faced with the very real possibility that the world will end in an orgy of nuclear explosions in less than an hour and a half and Miracle Mile becomes a 100 million dollar blockbuster. 

Miracle Mile very nearly got made with, alternately Kurt Russell or Nicolas Cage in the lead. Both would have been ideal: Russell would bring automatic authenticity to the role while Cage would have given the character his trademark sweaty, mounting intensity.

But Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham as the male and female leads along with a premise rooted in nuclear devastation was enough to sink Miracle Mile at the box-office although it has subsequently gone on to win a devoted and loyal cult for very good reasons. It’s that rarest of creatures: a wholly and legitimately original movie, something we had not seen before at the time of the film’s release and would not seem again in the years since.

Edwards may not be a movie star or a conventional leading man but he is a terrific actor who very much rises to the challenge of carrying a movie on his narrow shoulders. 

In order for Miracle Mile to work emotionally and narratively its fantastical science fiction premise needs to be grounded in the concrete reality that Edwards and Winningham, and the phenomenal supporting cast bring to their roles.

For the movie to have any tension or suspense we need to believe, genuinely believe, that a frenzied call to a pay phone in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack in roughly seventy minutes could lead to the end of life on earth as we know it. 

Without that all-important element of verisimilitude, the frenzied machinations and desperate striving of the film’s terrified characters are much ado about nothing. 

Edwards makes us believe in the reality of Miracle Mile. His performance is marked by the urgency of a man convinced that unless he takes the right precautions an unthinkable death lies in his very near future. 

Miracle Mile begins, more or less, at the very beginning, with a short film on the Big Bang that plays at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, where our jazzman hero Harry (Edwards) meets cute with waitress Julie (Mare Winningham). 

It’s love at first sight as these smitten strangers fall instantly for each other as they embark on a crash course in romantic comedy adorableness, gazing adoringly at each other in slow motion and engaging in quintessential rom-com hijinks like buying a bunch of lobsters at a fancy restaurant just to set them free. 

Harry loves Julie even though she is rocking a rooster red mullet that only Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie has ever been able to pull off. 

They make a date to meet at the nifty all night diner where Julie works but due to a power outage Harry oversleeps. By the time he reaches the diner Julie has taken a Valium and gone to sleep but he does arrive at the diner just in time to answer a ringing pay phone alerting him to the end of the world in under ninety minutes. 

Miracle Mile opens on a woozily romantic note aided immeasurably by Tangerine Dream’s mesmerizing electronic score, which goes a long way towards establishing a dreamlike tone that remains consistent even after the film shifts from a romantic reverie to a waking nightmare 

It’s amazing how inveterately melancholy Los Angeles becomes when it is empty. Miracle Mile takes place during the weird limbo world between very late night and very early morning, when the sane, respectable world is asleep, leaving lonely streets the exclusive domain of night time people. 

Good looking motion picture.

Miracle Mile continually upends audience expectations. We begin on a note of pure, swooning romance only to shift gears dramatically once the possibility/probability of nuclear annihilation enters the occasion. 

When our panicked and overwhelmed protagonist shares his news with the rest of the patrons at the diner Miracle Mile morphs once again into a chamber piece about a group of ordinary people confronted with a decidedly non-ordinary dilemma. 

What do you do with the final 70 minutes of your life? Do you spend that time desperately trying to prevent, or at least postpone the inevitable? Do you attempt to make peace with your imminent death or get blasted out of your mind on drugs or booze? 

Do you spend the final minutes of your life trying to connect with another human being in the deepest, most meaningful way possible, by falling helplessly, hopelessly in love as the world goes flamboyantly to shit all around you? 

What if the end isn’t really the end but rather a tragic hoax gone too far? 

Miracle Mile’s premise suggests both Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and The Twilight Zone. Apparently De Jarnatt’s script was even at one point under consideration as a possible segment in the Twilight Zone movie.

But is Miracle Mile a Reagan-era twist on “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, a sly commentary on fear and paranoia and the way they bring out the worst in us, or a story about the end of the world? 

Harry eventually tracks down Julie, who is too zonked out of her mind on Valium and sleepy to realize what’s going on and together they try to make it to a helicopter that will take them to an airport and out of harm’s way.

With every passing minute the situation grows increasingly perilous and deadly as the night descends into a lurid neon fever dream of nuclear anxiety and all-consuming fear. What begins as a romance shifts into sweaty, nightmarish Noir territory before morphing once again into something approaching full-on horror as fear and desperation grips the city, transforming everyday people into violent animals who will do anything to stay alive, if that’s even an option. 

Miracle Mile ends in a way that all but guaranteed its commercial failure. If combining the romantic comedy with nuclear annihilation wasn’t enough to scare mainstream audiences away concluding with EVERYBODY in the world dying would undoubtedly do the trick. That bleak, powerful ending might have killed the film’s chances of being a hit but it all but ensured cult immortality. 

Miracle Mile begins, more or less, with the beginning of everything, the Big Bang, with a dry rundown on the beginning of life on this fragile, dying planet and ends with humanity’s long run at the very top of the food chain drawing to a violent and permanent close. 

In between De Jarnatt and a terrific cast, with a whole lot of help from the Tangerine Dream’s elegant dreamscapes tell a story that is at once intimate and epic, as small as the romance of two little people in a great big city and as massive as the end of the world. 

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