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Miracle Mile (1988)
Review
“I never really saw the big picture before. Not till today.”
Harry Washello
The year is 1988 and nuclear holocaust is just one red button away at any given moment. Tensions between the US and Russia, while beginning to thaw, are still very perilous and cinema at the time never failed to remind moviegoers that doomsday end of the world scenarios were a very real possibility. The Emergency Broadcast System and public school attack drills served as everyday reminders that the unthinkable could occur when least expected. In short, the dread was very real.
Enter 1988’s box office dud, “The Miracle Mile”. In the opening scene we see our male lead, Harry, explaining pre-historic life to a class of grade school kids when he meets and falls in love with Julie. She falls for Harry and his jazz trumpet playing ways immediately. They decide to do on a date after Julie’s midnight shift is over. All is good in their life and optimism runs high. That is until a power outage takes out Harry’s alarm clock and he oversleeps. It is then, that the movie takes a turn for chaos as we are transported to the pre-dawn hours of Los Angeles.
Harry calls Julie from the diner to apologize his missed date. In typical 1980s fashion, he calls from a dingy payphone. However, after his call, he picks up a mysterious phone call from an unknown caller. This unknown caller thinks he is calling his father but mistakenly calls the phone booth outside Julie’s coffee shop. Harry answers the phone and what he hears throws him for a loop. Impending nuclear war is just a few hours away. It turns out that the mysterious caller is supposedly a soldier in a top-secret missile silo facility. At first Harry could not believe the call is real. He struggles to accept the reality of the phone call and a mysterious voice on the other end of the call tells him to “Forget everything...go back to sleep”.
Harry stumbles back into the dinner and nervously tries to compose himself. The movie from this point on takes off as we are transported into the chaotic frenzy of Harry’s realization that he only has a few hours before impact. Every Cold War paranoic’s worst nightmare begins to unfold.
As Harry tries to explain to the other patrons of the coffee shop of the nuclear war scenario that is brewing is all to real, we are introduced to a plethora of characters from the LA early morning hours crowd including a stewardess, a trans hooker, a yuppie Wall Street broker (complete with an 80s cellphone and a condensed version of “Gravity’s Rainbow”), a crazy prepper cook and various unbelievers who think Harry is just one more weirdo nut in vast sea of LA loonies.
Anthony Edward’s Harry character comes off the screen as an enigmatic everyday day man and quite possibly the guy with the worst luck in the world. At 30, he finally meets the love of his life but its the same day that nuclear missiles are about to literally rain on his parade.
Harry’s urgency convinces some of the coffee shop patrons that the phone call was real. Other’s mock him by saying “There’s lots of good actors in this town with insomnia and nothing better to do than stupid things like that”. Strikingly, another patron scared witless about the reality of the situation says “When was the last time they told you what to do in case. There’s no plans!”. This scene works so damn well because it sets up the gravity of the situation, with some believing Harry and ready to flee to safer grounds while others dismiss him as a weirdo and stay behind, no doubt staunch believers that if it were real then they would have been informed by the Emergency Broadcast System.
Like so many others, atom bombs and their attacks induced nightmares in my childhood, with so much of it resulting from the general public’s unpreparedness for such an event. This is portrayed very effectively in “Miracle Mile”. Harry and his new believers flock together and scramble in a last hour effort to avoid the catastrophic repercussions of the actions of world leaders.
The movie works beyond being a doomsday flick. Tangerine Dreams musical score pulsates and functions as a countdown as Harry rushes all over town in search of Julie to warn her of disaster. He frantically tries to find her and we can easily place ourselves in his shoes. His anxiety over impending doom resonates because, like Harry, we have no control over nuclear war. We are powerless to stop it, if it ever occurs. As George Orwell argued, “the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons”, and Harry, and the public in general have no weapon to fight back.
One of the most difficult aspects of this type of disaster flick is convincing the moviegoer that “the end of the world is near”. Anthony Edwards as Harry Washello gives a tour de force performance because he single-handedly carries the second half of the film. We sense his total urgency as he scrambles in late 1980s LA and even implodes upon an aerobics class as he searches for a helicopter pilot. When the end does arrive, the movie does a decent job of portraying chaos and mass hysteria as people take to the streets and partake in desperate actions sprung from an impeding atomic bomb strike. All this is done without the use of CGI and while that might show its age, it also indicates it’s a product of its time, a late 1980s zeitgeist that was not overly dependent on green screens to capture a city wide riot. I commend the film because the last 30 minutes of the movie move at fast pace and it captivates the viewer’s attention as we become totally invested in Harry and his recently found love.
“Miracle Mile” works because the script moves fast, the acting is well done, the musical score shines and the viewer never finds the story dull or completely unbelievable. In the mid to late 1980s, this movie was a real possibility. The Day After had preceded this film by only 5 years and the reality of the full scare nuclear attack had not completely waned; the film captures this fear down to its tragic yet perfect ending. The film’s ending might not be to everyone’s taste; however, it fits so much in line with the bleak view of Cold War denizens. From start to end, the Miracle Mile is a superb yet forgotten film that needs to be enjoyed by a new generation of post Cold War aficionados. We might be past the US vs Soviet tensions of the 1980s, yet doomsday might still lurk around the corner. If so, then Harry’s final words will loom large, “There is nothing out there. There is nothing left”. Right before the blast obliterates it all.
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*Rating 3 out of 4 stars
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