With the impending release of Damsels in Distress, the first Whit Stillman movie in 13 years, my wife and I decided to go back and revisit his last film, The Last Days of Disco, which we did not like when we first saw it (in 1998) but which we felt we might have judged too harshly. Nope, we were right the first time – it really stinks!

Let me be clear: I feel that Whit Stillman’s first two movies, Metropolitan and Barcelona, are two of the greatest films ever made, films that only grow in my estimation as the years go by and which hold exalted positions in my collection. I am not going to expand on this here, as I plan to do a through appreciation piece on them both at some point. But I want to mention this because to understand why Disco fails you have to understand what Stillman was trying to copy and why it didn’t work this time.

There are three huge failings in Disco. First, Stillman recycled his character “types” from the first two movies, but he completely failed to keep his (Disco) characters meticulously delineated. In the men, you see the thinking, behavior and speech patterns of Ted & Fred Boynton, Charile, Nick, Tom Townsend, even Von Sloneker – all mixed up in ways that make no sense. In all the girls you see a mishmash of Audry, Jane, Sally and Cynthia! Stillman’s bizarrely wonderful dialog only works if all the characters are rigidly distinct. Otherwise it’s a great big mess.

The second big failing is that Stillman had way too many storylines going on in this film. Too many triangles, too many plots (multiple nightclub dramas, roommate dramas, evil boyfriend dramas, publishing politics, advertising politics, and on and on and on,) and WAY too many characters who suddenly, at different points in the film, start acting as if they are the central character of the movie.

The third big problem is that the casting was all wrong. Stillman finally got to cast “semi-stars” in this film, but none of these actors are able to pull off his quirky, stilted dialog and interactions the way those complete no-name actors did in his first two films. Sevigny is the worst – she acts completely disconnected from the material. As for the others, Astin, Keeslar, Ross, and Robert Sean Leonard give it the ole college try, I suppose, but they are all flat, interchangeable, and completely uninteresting and uncompelling. Kate Beckinsale come off a bit better, and might have been okay if her character had been written better and more consistently, but at the end of the day I got the impression that she was just recycling her performance in Cold Comfort Farm rather than really rising up to the unique challenges of this material.

Then there is Chris Eigeman, who since he was a star in the first two movies you might think would be a slam dunk in this one. But even he is totally adrift here. He has no one to play off of that is equal to the material, and he is stuck in a side-character, but because he is “Chris Eigeman,” so much better suited to Stillman’s dialog than anyone else in the film, he immediately dominates the story even though his character is peripheral and almost completely uninteresting. What a mess!

On that last point, I think Stillman’s movies need Taylor Nichols and Christopher Eigeman in the lead roles. To me, those two guys are simply irreplaceable – they ARE Whit Stillman’s movies. Just notice how Disco comes to life when Taylor Nichols starts talking in his brief cameo. It’s remarkable, really, when you realize how essential those two guys are. Everyone around them can change, but they need to be there, doing their thing. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong with Damsels in Distress – I am a huge fan of Adam Brody, who should (theoretically) be a perfect Stillman character. But sometimes a perfect recipe needs the exact ingredients that make it perfect.