“Maybe it’s time to let go,” sighs Stanley (Richard Jenkins), with typical last-to-the-party obliviousness. After 38 years working his way up to $13 per hour flipping burgers and cleaning grease traps in the same dingy fast food restaurant in Albion Michigan, by any measure, the time to go passed a long, long while back. Andrew Cohn‘s “The Last Shift” begins as Stanley’s lifetime at Oscar’s Fast Food ends. His final duty is the training of his replacement, Jevon (Shane Paul McGhie) a quick-witted but directionless young father-of-one just released from a stint in county, disproportionate to the minor infractions he committed. Sadsack old white guy is forced to spend time with vital young Black screw-up? You think you know in which mutual lesson-learning direction this is headed. And for a time you’re right, but, for better and worse, only for a time.
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Stanley’s life is, like Albion, Michigan, small. Unlike Albion, Michigan, it is not blessed with anything, like a cider mill, that “people like to look at.” The mill is offered up as a mild defense of the town his best (only?) friend Don (an enjoyably cantankerous Ed O’Neill) insists on describing as “a shithole.” It’s hard to disagree with Don’s assessment, but in this already titchy pond, there’s the smaller pond of Oscar’s and in that, after nearly four decades Stanley has finally become a medium-sized fish. As if to compensate for the paltriness of his life elsewhere—he has no car, no social life, is estranged from his brother and lives in a flophouse where his housemates smoke crack in the living room—he takes intense, performative pride in his humdrum responsibilities, especially during the graveyard shift to which he insists, there is “an art.”
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Jevon, beset by problems at home where the mother of his young son is on the verge of leaving him, sees through Stanley’s claims of a “co-manager-type deal” with no-nonsense Shazz (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who is actually in charge. But he is patient with the old guy anyway, suppressing the eyerolls that he undoubtedly feels while Stanley delivers another pearl of wisdom about burger patties or being able to predict who will choose ranch sauce over barbecue. If Jenkins is the known quantity of excellence here—fleshing Stan out in details like the asthmatic little huff that is his laugh— McGhie is the small revelation, all private smiles and micro-expressions, able to convey amused affection under a veneer of seriousness, and so to clue us into his prickly but thoughtful character’s fundamental good nature.
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But amid the gentle bonding, the impromptu, slow-night games of frozen-patty hockey and humorous anecdotes about the time Stan shat himself while playing the French horn in band practice, darker notes sound and, surprisingly, come to dominate the film’s final third (literally too—the pleasant plinks of Mark Orton’s score become gradually less cute). Stan scoffs at Jevon’s firebrand, self-educated socialist ideas about labor and capital and reacts with visceral denial when “privilege” is mentioned. “Nobody gave me anything — I worked for everything I have,” he responds angrily, conveniently forgetting, as he so often does, that he has nothing. And this willful blindness to systemic evil is also in evidence in Stan’s latent racism—which can be traced all the way back to the day in high school when he and Don ran off while a Black classmate was beaten to death, and then gave no testimony afterward. Perhaps that act of extreme selfishness could have been written down to the follies of his far-off youth, except that as more things go wrong for Stan, which he conflates with Jevon’s arrival in his life, he begins to make less forgivable new decisions, that suggest certainly in terms of racial sensitivity and one’s duty to one’s fellow man, he has learned precisely nothing over that long span of time.
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This screenplay, written by Cohn, was at one time intended for Executive Producer Alexander Payne to direct, which won’t surprise anyone who picks up on its laughing-at-or-laughing-with? view of small-town America, its veering tone of sympathy for, then deep judgment of, the attitudes of self-deluding old men, and its late embrace of the bitter over the sweet. Not that the film needs to have the obvious teachable-moment ending that seems to beckon at its cookie-cutter Sundance-indie outset—it’s a very good thing that the story is not of a white guy’s redemption. But the focus does remain on the white guy, especially in the final third, when, at the expense of seeing Jevon’s arguably more interesting arc unfold, the film comes dangerously close to being one of those irritating ‘heartland America’ op-eds that focuses on some red-cap-wearing old guy in a Midwestern diner and attempts to portray his unreconstructed bigotries as The Great American Tragedy of our time. A tragedy that it’s beholden on the rest of us to understand, if not to excuse.
And so one is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve “The Last Shift” made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around. The film’s final scene is eloquent and, in its way, damning but it also convinces us that the future, and therefore more of our attention, belongs to those who can meet its gaze head-on, rather than those who furtively lower their eyes and pretend they haven’t seen it looking their way. [B]
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