The Last Supper

I hadn’t seen this 1995 gem for a good long while. I was over visiting a good friend of mine who is an inactive member – he showed me the first episode of Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix and I suggested the Last Supper would appeal to his very black sense of humor.

The film features an interesting cast – Ron Perlman is the star turn, possibly his best role; Bill Paxton, Charles Durning, Elisabeth Moss, Courtney B. Vance, Annabelle Gish and a then unknown Cameron Diaz.

The film’s main premise is this very commonly asked question – if you could go back to 1909 and kill a young Adolf Hitler, would you? It has also been misconstrued as a piece of liberal Hollywood propaganda because its message has gone straight over certain people’s heads.

One dark and rainy night, a group of very smug and well-off grad students are sitting at home, eating a fancy supper, when their housemate comes to the door. His car has broken down and a trucker has helped him. They invite the trucker in for supper… it transpires he is a Gulf War veteran and holds some pro-Hitler views. After he attacks a Jewish housemate, he ends up being stabbed in self-defense. The students decide to bury the body under their tomato patch, because they don’t want trouble.

The housemates are all pretty or handsome – the scenario is like Friends gone wrong!

One of the students asks the Hitler conundrum- if you could, would you? And they bring over various guests who are poisoned by them in turn. There is only one problem – their victims become less and less objectionable, and they end up becoming more and more like the people they hate.

However, while the film lags a bit in the middle, it has a pretty impressive finale.

I think the film is unfair on religion but it does use religious imagery in many places including the title itself.

The conservative* victims often have stereotypical views – but that is the point – they are being lampooned and the students think of them all as Hitler. However, the liberals are the real butt of the joke here. The film is in some ways twenty years ahead of its time – we have seen such extremism come to fore in US politics recently, and we also see the political spectrum splintering into isolated echo chamber groups.

Warning: the film contains swearing and some violence (no nudity though).

* I’m not a fan of the conservative/liberal paradigm. I consider myself neither.