This, writer-director Steve De Jarnatt's second feature film, remains criminally underrated. And more obscure than a film this good should be.
The tightly constructed script was one of Hollywood's famous unfilmed scripts for a decade before it went into production - everyone wanted to read it, and once they read it, no one wanted to produce it. It was too dark, too quirky, too downbeat. It wasn't until he had directed a feature film - the 1987 sci-fi cheapy Cherry 2000 - that De Jarnatt was able to convince anyone to let him direct Miracle Mile, with production company Hemdale Films giving him a $3.7M budget.
It starts like a screwball comedy and then - like all screwball comedy - turns into a nightmare. It tells the story of trombonist Harry Warshello (Anthony Edwards), who has a perfect first date with cafe waitress Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) and then finds circumstances conspiring to keep them apart. Running three hours late for a midnight rendezvous with Julie, Harry answers a persistently ringing phone booth to hear an hysterical voice warning of an imminent nuclear attack, and inadvertently starts a wave of panic when the rumour starts to spread, eventually hearing distorted versions of his story coming back to him, Chinese whisper style.
Harry's night in L.A. running from one crazy character to the next recalls Griffin Dunne's nightmare night in SoHo in Martin Scorsese's After Hours. However, unlike the Scorsese film, Miracle Mile is more than just a series of brilliantly executed plot mechanics designed to put the protagonist through hell. De Jarnatt makes the most of his tiny budget, his inventive visuals matched by a terrific and driving score by Tangerine Dream which would have to rank as their best work in film.
Performances are great all round - Edwards and Winningham are sensational and heartbreaking as their characters come to terms with true love in the midst of disaster, with Mykelti Williamson a stand out in the uniformly good supporting cast. Elsewhere we have Denise Crosby as a no-nonsense high powered business woman desperately trying to raise Carl Sagan on her gigantic mobile phone to tell him the bad news (it was 1988, and she's also got the shoulder pads) and Jennette Goldstein in a tiny but funny role as a Beverly Hills socialite. The structure of the film is consistently surprising but never deviates from it's own nightmare logic. And the elements that De Jarnatt concocts his happy ending from have to be seen to be believed.
The film won raves at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival, followed by a negligible release that went unnoticed. MGM put out a no frills, full frame (4:3) DVD on 2003 which is better than not having the film at all, but only just.
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