Sky K Studios Movie Blog

The Brown Bunny

Buffalo 66 ranks as one of the best movies ever, with its simple story of Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo), a confused and pathetic loser filled by and fueled by bitterness and loneliness. Billy stumbles through the film, seeking friendship, justice, acceptance and, more than anything, to only connect. He is sad, honest and heartbreaking. The film is too, with its flights of fancy, powerful visuals and innovative camera and editing techniques. Though criticized as yet another male fantasy movie (Billy kidnaps the doe-eyed and be-cleaveged Christina Ricci, and as the film unfolds the main thread concerns his ability -- or lack thereof -- to have even the most basic connection with another human being), Buffalo 66 is really about how any two human beings manage to look through all the shit and see one another as people.

But if Buffalo 66 is the story about Billy trying to find a connection with another person, The Brown Bunny is the story of Bud (also, of course, Gallo) refusing a connection with anyone. Sadly, Gallo's sophomore effort is a total rehashing of every theme and facet of Buffalo 66, only less interestingly rendered, absent any ability for the audience to connect with our antihero, and, simply, more boring.

Gallo stumbles through this film also, alternately reaching out to -- and pushing away -- every woman he meets (he's working through some stuff, as we find out). But rather than ultimately finding that there is an actual person out there with whom to connect, here all the women are just balls of dough for him to bounce off of. Buffalo 66 uses Billy's cringe-inducing immaturity and arrested development to propel his own growth. The Brown Bunny just makes us cringe.

Given the almost total lack of dialogue, the script must have run to about ten pages; camera notes on every page must have read "steal shot from Buffalo 66."

When a director's second film is a much, much worse version of his first film, does he get to make a third film? Given Gallo's truly wonderous narcissism (which I found easy to overlook in Buffalo 66, but impossible to overlook in The Brown Bunny), its hard to imagine him not finding a way.

posted by Jon Z at 9:38 AM