# Last Supper, The (1995)

### reviewed by
Shane Burridge

    The Last Supper (1995) 92m.

Drawing-room comedy for the 90s. A group of postgrad students (Cameron Diaz, Courney B. Vance, Annabeth Gish, and others) meet every Sunday for dinner to socialize and discuss politics, art, and philosophy. After sharing their table with an unexpected guest they come to the conclusion that talk is cheap, and that the only way to make the world the better place they dream of is to set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioners, and rid it of all the people that would impede their vision. From that point on, the dinner parties become trials. Film will hold your attention - its characters are literate and varied enough to encompass a range of opinions - but is really a one-note symphony. The first dinner party is essentially a setup for the last: looking back you'll see there is no need for the several similar scenes other than to chart the development of the characters' convictions or doubts. To give us a sense that the story is going somewhere, screenwriter Dan Rosen trails a subplot through the film involving a police officer and a missing girl, but the fact remains that the two dinner conversations that bookend the film outweigh the others inbetween. The first of these, with Bill Paxton, blends wit and tension effectively enough for us to look forward to a rematch with the postgrad's nominal nemesis Norman Arbuthnot (Ron Perlman, who plays his TV broadcaster like Rod Serling in narrator mode). Paxton and Perlman are great, and certainly more likely to remain in your memory than the walk-ons by Charles Durning, Mark Harmon, and Jason Alexander.

Message of film can be summed up with tried and true 'what goes around comes around' and when the students start turning into the persecutors that they hate, the only real surprise is why none of them were ever bright enough to see it happening (although Diaz is the first to voice her disapproval). They're also too caught up in what they're doing to see that the people they are setting up as targets are becoming successively less extreme and increasingly marginal as candidates for their agenda. It was an interesting choice to make the group's only black character the most fascistic of the group. Best moment of film is also its most subtle, when at the height of their fanaticism the characters are suddenly reminded of the real, normal world existing outside their house by something as simple as a hold signal on a telephone. Problem: if we are to assume that one of the students is responsible for the paintings we see in the credits, how does that explain the last picture?

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