A lengthy response to the long (and ever-longer) lost cause that is “Until The End of the World”

I’m feeling nostalgic. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the holidays, or maybe it’s the thought of my teen heading off to university next year. What I do know is that between the plague that has us all at our wit’s end and the frightening disintegration of our neighbours to the south, the future seems less appealing than the past. 

So, nostalgia it is.

I was in my late teens / early twenties at the start of the 1990s, and I find myself reflecting wistfully on this era, on a time when I was freer to follow my whims, on a world without the ambient anxiety field generated by the Internet, and when you could go to a bar in the same clothes that you’d slept in have that be considered “style.” (Side note: ladies, please bring back army boots and cutoff jeans over leggings!)

And so it was in this nostalgic mindset that I decided to dive into the nearly FIVE HOUR director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ 1991 arthouse flop “Until the End of the World.” My situation was a perfect storm: I was on holiday, my spouse was away visiting family, and my Criterion subscription was coming to an end- it was now or never. After having sat through this interminable 4 hour and 45 minute version, I can tell you that the movie, while not without its strengths, is not great, and that adding a few more hours does nothing to correct its shortcomings, quite the opposite in fact. (Note: The director says that the theatrically-released version had “all the fun” taken out of it, which implies that there was some fun to begin with.)

Normally, I write about the things I love, but I feel compelled to record my thoughts about this weird cinematic footnote. 

When I watch an overlong movie, I usually say something like, “there’s a good movie in there somewhere, it just needs to be cut down.” Not here. Two friends independently relayed the following anecdote: while seeing the movie at their local rep cinema, the movie has a line towards the finale that goes something like “we thought it was the end, but it was only just beginning” at which point the entire audience groaned.

While I wasn’t among those who saw it upon release, I do remember its soundtrack, and if you were digging the indie scene at the time, you definitely heard it, too- maybe in a cafe or coming from the tape deck of a friend’s hand-me-down car. It’s a real slice of the musical times, featuring such 90s notables as Julee Cruise, who had made a small but memorable splash as the breathy, baby-doll voice on the Twin Peaks soundtrack; The Talking Heads, who had gone from thoughtful outsiders to mainstream eccentrics; and garage-band-made-good southern boys REM. U2 loaned their song which became the title track, and it can still be heard on the radio from time to time. To further prove its street cred, the soundtrack added legends of the musical avant garde: Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and CAN. Even a few Canadians make the cut, including critical darling Jane Siberry (with an assist by k.d. lang) via her dreamy, affecting “Calling All Angels.” Not every track makes the cut in the shorter versions of the movie, which must have confused anyone who experienced both at the time.

Wenders’ budget for this film was over 20 million dollars, an unheard of sum for a filmmaker of Wender’s stature. At the time, he was one of the big art house auteurs, having previously made Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, both of which are great, but not what you’d call blockbuster material. The film was a failure both critically and financially, earning less than one million dollars at the box office. 

The plot, such as it is, involves Claire (Solveig Dommartin, RIP), a vivacious French woman, leaving her freewheeling life behind in order to pursue the mysterious Trevor (William Hurt) around the world. Eventually we learn that Trevor has run off with his father’s invention, a device that records what its wearer sees, and can then make those images visible to the blind. (Considering the size of the budget, you might expect the device to look less like a ViewMaster attached to a colander.) The couple travel around the globe, evading authorities, betraying one another, and committing crimes, all in an effort to record images of the world so that Hurt’s blind mother can see them before she dies. Running in the background is something about a satellite that is crashing to earth, which has the world freaked out.

It’s a fabulous cast, including the late, great Max Von Sydow and the always reliable Sam Neill. The two leads, William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, are attractive, in their physical prime, and spend some time shirtless, but even PG-13 nudity can’t justify a nearly-five hour run time. Would anything? Well, maybe, but not for this movie. I’ve sat through some long movies, most notably the extended version of the Lord of the Rings, which I can watch without ever growing bored. Butt-sore maybe, but never bored. And the scenes which were added to the LOTR extended cuts are fan-pleasing bits from the books that were dropped as they don’t really drive the plot. I can see why they’d be left out, but as a Tolkien fan I appreciate seeing Pippin and Merry enjoying the growth effects of Treebeard’s enchanted pool. Other epics, like Doctor Zhivago, are tedious (to me anyway) but at least the story is always going somewhere. The same can’t be said for Until the End of the World.

The movie is so flawed right to its DNA that I don’t see a way to save it. Just read this disjointed tagline:

It’s 1999. The government will kill for his invention. One woman will do anything for his love. Together they share an adventure that circles the globe – And invades the mind.

WTF. Even the tagline doesn’t know what kind of movie it is, which leads me to the first on my list of the film’s many failings…

Personality Crisis: The downfall of many a film is a lack of commitment to, or understanding of, its core persona. Until the End of the World suffers from this common ailment, not knowing if it’s a travelogue, a romance, a spy thriller, a sci-fi cautionary tale, or an exercise in audience endurance. I understand that Wenders imagined it as the “ultimate road movie” but if you think of the greats, from Detour to Thelma and Louise, the travel aspect runs the length of the movie, and, in the end, the characters are transformed. That sort of happens here, but in the five hour version the road ends before the movie does, and any enjoyment that this viewer had dies a slow and protracted death in the Australian outback. Speaking of which, in an interview with Wenders that accompanied this new cut, he speaks about his original idea for the movie, which involved a scientist (Sydow) locked in a cave in Australia following a nuclear war. That actually goes a long way towards explaining the disjointed nature of the film, and why it spends so much time in Australia at the end. 

Stultifying Boredom: I’m not the most patient person, but I have managed to sit through some pretty slow movies. (I’m looking at you, Solaris.) If a director is expecting their audience to sit through a movie 2-3 times longer than normal, then they’d better provide a commensurate increase in narrative. Obviously, this didn’t happen. We get slow scenes of people talking, or walking, or staring off into the distance. Later we get scene after scene after scene of fuzzy computer renderings.  

Consider the wonderful, if melancholy, Nomadland. It too is a road movie, and one with even less action than UTEOTW. The difference is that the director of Nomadland ensures that each scene tells us more and more about the characters and their world. Occasionally, the camera moves away from the nomads to take in the vistas of their beautifully spartan world. It all means something.hat’s a slow moving tale I can get behind. 

Bad Sci-Fi: 8 years into the future is not that much of a stretch, making this reviewer wonder why they bothered at all. The “futuristic” elements are sparsely, nay, half-assedly presented. Has Wenders even seen a sci-fi movie? Super Nintendo level graphics on a monitor do not a vivid future make. Also, is it supposed to be a mishmash of time periods? Hurt spends half of the movie in a kind of Humphrey Bogart drag that suggests film noir, but that idea is never fully realised. When it comes to sci-fi film noir, Ridley Scott already hit a home run with Blade Runner. And if you want to see anachronism done right, look no further than Tim Burton’s first Batman, which has video calls in one scene and mid-century flashbulb cameras in the next. Or the teen horror flick It Follows, which adds disconcerting anachronisms throughout.

Vestigial Characters: Many people get caught up in the narrative’s wake, often due to their attraction to the female lead. When the storylines of these side characters run out of steam, the movie keeps them on board, despite having no use for them. Rüdiger Vogler’s private eye Philip Winter is added early on, but four hours later there he is up on screen, with nothing to do in the finale except be part of an interminable, multicultural jam session. WHY?????? There are at least three men in the finale who are completely taken with, but not lovers of, the female lead.

All that being said, I always appreciate someone with intense commitment to their own vision. Wenders fought for years to make this happen, cobbling together finances and taking a crew around the world- Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, San Francisco, and around Australia. He had a dream and he fought to realise it. Unfortunately, his dream stinks. If I get the opportunity, I still might check out the shortest version available, just to see what it’s like. Call me nostalgic.