 Buffalo '66 (1998) Shame on me. Vincent Gallo is the fucking bomb, and this has quickly become my favorite film of all time. Wow, that probably made me sound much more like a 19-year-old art school student than I'd intended. Even so, it's hard for me to hold back on the girlish gushing and pretentious superlatives when discussing this movie, which I foist on pretty much everyone I get an opportunity to talk to, from good friends to casual acquaintances to local homeless folk. "Here you go, brother," I say, grabbing the homeless guy severely by a coat lapel and plying his hand with three dollars. "Don't fucking waste this on wine, you son of a bitch. Go rent Buffalo '66 and turn your fucking life around." Er … well, I never said I was socially sophisticated. Neither is Billy Brown, the antihero of this movie, semi-autobiographically drawn from Gallo's life and played by Gallo himself. I love Vincent Gallo because he is the most monomaniacal person I have ever heard of, well beyond myself and my thousands of pages of vulgar reviews on this site. He wrote, directed, starred in, scored, and produced the thing himself, not to mention he thinks he's a genius and believes himself to be equally talented in film, art, and music (he even signed to fucking Warp). And he's probably right. Buffalo '66 is certainly a vehicle for Gallo, but it's an amazing ensemble piece as well, somewhat in the vein of John Cassavetes but with a very well-defined aesthetic all its own. The plot hinges around Billy Brown getting out of jail and going home to a) try to impress his parents by being a "big shot" and b) murder the Buffalo Bills place kicker whom he blames for his imprisonment (the guy blew an easy kick that ended Billy up in a bookie's serious debt). He kidnaps a girl (Christina Ricci) from her dance school, takes her home to act as his "wife," and of course she falls for him, as kidnapped people always do. You know what, though: it's believable in the context of the story, and Ricci totally makes the character live and breathe. It could have been a wooden, sexist archetype, but she makes it very real, and makes it work. It's probably her best performance since Casper. Billy's father is played by the supremely amazing (and apparently very drunk) Ben Gazzara, his mother by Anjelica Huston, in some of the most jaw-dropping scenes of family dysfunction you'll ever see played off as awkward comedy. Jan-Michael Vincent puts in a very sad cameo in which he clearly can not even remember his lines, and yet that could not be more perfect for his character, so it's inadvertently brilliant. Gallo is literally reminding him of his lines onscreen, but what comes across is this shell-shocked lowlife who is just barely getting by – not a big stretch for JMV, apparently. Rosanna Arquette and Mickey Rourke show up for brief, very unpleasant, and quite excellent cameos as well. Gallo is probably the most astute film student making films – everything smacks of an incredible instinct for what makes a fucking cool movie, from casting to photography to title fonts to music. The music is a mixture of Gallo's own lo-fi home-recorded jazz-pop, prog-rock gemstones from Yes and King Crimson, and even a song by Vincent Gallo, Sr., singing to a Nelson Riddle backing track (actually recorded by an adolescent Gallo, Jr. to avoid a beatin'). There is so much in this movie that is purely great, so much real brilliance inherent in it and so much amazing shit behind the illusion. Who knows what of it is literally from Gallo's actual life, you know enough of it is that you get a very clear idea where the guy is coming from. And best of all, it escapes the self-schooled "cool movie" shit that is going to make the Tarantino bullshit look more and more plastic as the years go on (and I already think those movies are very fucking plastic). Gallo is making movies that will stick around. Sure, you can't get a Cassavetes movie at Blockbuster, but certainly there are other types of permanence. Buffalo '66 is one of those rare things, a masterpiece right out of the gate.
Review by Joshua R. Tree |
