"Buffalo '66," written and directed by Vincent Gallo (whose name means "victorious chicken"), is basically just another life-is-bleak-and-I'm-such-a-loser exercise of the type I generally find so tiresome. Well-made, though at times heavy-handed: one of the very first scenes, with Billy Brown (Gallo again), fresh out of the joint, huddling on a park bench out front and flooded with (very '60s) multi-screen images of prison flashbacks, could've been effectively supplanted with a simple shot of him on the bench with the prison looming in the background. And Billy's parents' crass neglect of him (they're so out of touch with him they don't know he's been in prison!) is driven home with a nine-pound hammer. But Billy himself is such an unpleasant schmuck that one wonders why we should give a rat's a$$ about him.
A good cast is generally underused here: Anjelica Huston is Billy's mom, whose rabid Bills fandom was done better (i.e., chillingly) by Frances McDormand as a deranged Dallas Cowboys fan in "Lone Star." Ben Gazzara is Billy's near-catatonic father; Rosanna Arquette has a small role as Billy's unattainable life-long crush. But Christina Ricci, as the sexy baby-doll Billy abducts to take to dinner at his parent's place (he's told them he's married, and he forces the girl to pretend to be his wife), is most criminally wasted.
In dire contrast to the razor-sharp Dede Truitt of "The Opposite of Sex," here Ms. Ricci plays Layla, a passive and evidently very stupid little girl who's just along for the ride. That she doesn't take advantage of her many opportunities to escape her abductor tells us that she is, at best, easily dominated, and at worst, very dumb. That she ultimately (and predictably) falls for Billy tells us that she's either attracted to the bad-boy mystique, or that she's got a "nurturing" nature that thrives on taking in wounded (and dangerous) strays like Billy: in either case, again, very dumb. As always--if anything, even more so than usual--Ms. Ricci looks good enough to eat with a spoon; and in a surreal moment almost worth the price of a rental, we learn that she can tapdance. But the part is underwritten, and is as unworthy of Ms. Ricci as Billy is of Layla's affections.
The movie's "happy ending" (no spoiler; keep reading) is a grotesque cop-out, obviously not so much an ending as a pause. Billy will still, no doubt, end up losing the girl, some time after the credits roll. He'll lose her not so much because he doesn't deserve her (since she's such a dimbulb, maybe he DOES), but because of his appalling lack of people skills, and because of his poor judgment in general, such as the brilliant idea that got him sent to prison in the first place.
Gallo has made a semi-autobiographical self-therapy piece: he's from Buffalo, and his parents' house in the movie is, or used to be, his actual parents' house. Apparently he made "Buffalo '66" for the therapeutic, success-is-the-best-revenge purpose of having somebody with Christina Ricci's face and body (but, significantly, not her brains!) fall for him before the eyes of the entire art-house movie-audience world. Dream on, Vinnie.
A good cast is generally underused here: Anjelica Huston is Billy's mom, whose rabid Bills fandom was done better (i.e., chillingly) by Frances McDormand as a deranged Dallas Cowboys fan in "Lone Star." Ben Gazzara is Billy's near-catatonic father; Rosanna Arquette has a small role as Billy's unattainable life-long crush. But Christina Ricci, as the sexy baby-doll Billy abducts to take to dinner at his parent's place (he's told them he's married, and he forces the girl to pretend to be his wife), is most criminally wasted.
In dire contrast to the razor-sharp Dede Truitt of "The Opposite of Sex," here Ms. Ricci plays Layla, a passive and evidently very stupid little girl who's just along for the ride. That she doesn't take advantage of her many opportunities to escape her abductor tells us that she is, at best, easily dominated, and at worst, very dumb. That she ultimately (and predictably) falls for Billy tells us that she's either attracted to the bad-boy mystique, or that she's got a "nurturing" nature that thrives on taking in wounded (and dangerous) strays like Billy: in either case, again, very dumb. As always--if anything, even more so than usual--Ms. Ricci looks good enough to eat with a spoon; and in a surreal moment almost worth the price of a rental, we learn that she can tapdance. But the part is underwritten, and is as unworthy of Ms. Ricci as Billy is of Layla's affections.
The movie's "happy ending" (no spoiler; keep reading) is a grotesque cop-out, obviously not so much an ending as a pause. Billy will still, no doubt, end up losing the girl, some time after the credits roll. He'll lose her not so much because he doesn't deserve her (since she's such a dimbulb, maybe he DOES), but because of his appalling lack of people skills, and because of his poor judgment in general, such as the brilliant idea that got him sent to prison in the first place.
Gallo has made a semi-autobiographical self-therapy piece: he's from Buffalo, and his parents' house in the movie is, or used to be, his actual parents' house. Apparently he made "Buffalo '66" for the therapeutic, success-is-the-best-revenge purpose of having somebody with Christina Ricci's face and body (but, significantly, not her brains!) fall for him before the eyes of the entire art-house movie-audience world. Dream on, Vinnie.