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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The "worst movie ever made"? Not at all. In fact, Vincent Gallo's latest film is one of the truest songs of roadside America the movies have ever produced.
Sep 17, 2004 | At the end of "The Brown Bunny," my wife turned to me and said, "Next time we hear somebody say they've just seen the worst movie ever made, let's make a beeline for it, because chances are, it's going to be pretty good."
"The worst movie ever made" was the general consensus after the film was shown at last year's Cannes Film Festival (in a version about 30 minutes longer than the one now in release), not just from Roger Ebert, who got into a public spat with the movie's writer/producer/director/star Vincent Gallo (since patched up), but from most critics, and from the audience that hooted and booed its way through the Cannes screening.
At the press conference following the screening, and in the interviews he gave, Gallo (who also acted as director of photography and editor) had inflamed the already fierce reception with the combative obnoxiousness that's come to define his public persona.
After Cannes, there had been predictions that the movie would never open. To get the movie into theaters, Gallo had to put on even more hats, acting as pretty much his own booker and publicist. When "The Brown Bunny" finally did open a few weeks back, the surprise is that many of the reviews were very appreciative.
"The Brown Bunny"
Written and directed by Vincent Gallo
Starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny
I still dragged my feet going to see it, not just because of Gallo's public behavior, but because that same hostility was all over his first film as director, "Buffalo 66." That picture felt like an art-house put-on, with the audience as the butt of the joke. Shortly after Ben Gazzara, as Gallo's father, strangled a puppy, I walked out.
So none of the good reviews for "The Brown Bunny" surprised me as much as my own reaction. Gallo's second feature turns out to be a gentle, lyrical road movie -- the sort of picture American indie cinema was supposed to nurture and support.
It's easy to see what annoys people about "The Brown Bunny." Gallo stubbornly sticks to his own sense of pacing. There is a story, as well as dramatic conflict, but Gallo refuses to push either. The movie is shot in a consciously muted naturalistic style that can easily be mistaken for meandering. For most of it, we're watching, with Gallo, through the smeared or rain-streaked windshield of his black van as he drives cross-country from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. Or looking at Gallo's sharp-nosed, unshaven profile, held in close-up to convey the masked turmoil in his character's solitude. Even when other characters enter the movie, the dialogue is sparse, the interaction subdued, tentative.
Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer who loses a meet in New Hampshire and sets out for his next competition in California. Variety is provided by the women Bud meets along the way: a teenage gas-station cashier (Anna Vareschi), a middle-aged woman at a truck stop (Cheryl Tiegs), a young street hooker (Elizabeth Blake) in Las Vegas -- all three of them drawn to him.
