Bunny hop

Caught The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo) at the Arbor last night. It's unfortunate that this film is already infamous for a couple of reasons that don't really have much to do with the style, form, or content of the movie and have a lot more to do with the lack of serious thought in current American film criticism and the media in general. Let's get those two reasons out of the way right off the bat. Firstly, the film premiered at the Cannes film festival last year in an unfinished rough cut that was about 25 minutes longer than the finished, released version. Many critics at the screening, most famously Roger Ebert, got all hot and bothered about what a horrific piece of garbage the movie was and called it one of the worst films of all time. Several months later, the finished film hits theaters and many of the same critics quietly and sheepishly backpedal, most famously Roger Ebert, and announce that the re-edited film is great/good/mediocre and hardly the worst film ever made and what a testament the finished film is to the editing process. While I agree that editing can drastically and dramatically change a film, for better and worse, I also feel that one can't polish a turd. I've read about three changes Gallo made to the film in re-editing, and I agree they probably made for a much better movie, but I suspect that the critics who so violently hated the film (most of them American critics for mainstream newspapers and magazines) were deep in lemming mode and are a little embarrassed at their rush to judgment. Secondly, too much has been written about the graphic oral sex scene. Near the end of the film, Chloe Sevigny gives Gallo a blowjob onscreen in a scene that's about as far from erotic as you can get and a natural progression of the scene's events that hardly seems prurient or gratuitous. The obsession with and reaction to this scene (roughly a fraction of 1/31 of the film's total screen time) from American critics and audiences and the reason most of the people in the theater were there to see it last night makes it painfully clear that our society is still in the midst of the death throes of both Puritanism and early adolescence and we can't decide which one to kill off first. Some critics even seem offended/obsessed with Gallo's penis, wasting paragraph space debating whether it's real or prosthetic and marveling at its size, as if their impressions of the movie's worth would change if Gallo had a more modest package. These same critics have kept oddly silent about Sevigny's breasts, which are even more on display than the aforementioned wang, though if she were credited as the writer/director maybe the size of her tits would come under the same scrutiny as Gallo's cock. However, I seriously doubt it. Something about penises and aggressive sexual activity in a non-pornographic film makes everybody turn into giggly 12-year-olds. Well, forget all about these two controversies because they don't matter very much. What does matter is that "The Brown Bunny," despite its handful of flaws, is a very fine film that shows male loneliness and the American landscape in a way I've never seen before. It's a film in love with long, unbroken takes of dirty windshields, highways, rainstorms, road signs, hotel rooms, human faces, and the houses and cars we spend our lives inside. It's the kind of movie that bores boring people. It's a movie that lets you look, really look, in such detail and for such a long time that Gallo lets you decide for yourself what you think about the images you're seeing. It's a film that has more in common with a mood, a poem or a song than a cohesive, tightly plotted story. I don't think it's perfect. The final scene is hungrily, honestly, embarrassingly, and desperately acted by Gallo and Sevigny and would make a beautiful short film in its own right, but I'm not sure it belongs in this movie. It supplies an explanation and a motivation for Gallo's behavior when what I really wanted was a deepening of the mystery. It provides closure for a film that otherwise refuses to be enclosed, answers for questions that should be left open and frustrating. But the scene, like the rest of the film, deserves to be seen on its own merits, not attended like a circus of dick-sucking and wrestling matches with Roger Ebert.