I enjoyed “Buffalo 66” when I saw it in the theater all those years ago. I remember finding the lost characters strangely affecting and the style of the film complementary to that emotional impact. Fast-forward to last week and “The Brown Bunny” was sitting on my desk, fresh from Netflix, waiting to be watched. I’d heard about the controversy and 
Ebert’s evisceration of the Cannes screening of the film, but I also thought that the film could be one of those anti-commercial successes that critics dislike, but are worth watching. When the movie ended, I thought I’d been wrong. However, a few days later on, I am still thinking about the movie, which should be a good sign. Somehow, Vincent Gallo convinces people, talented people, to work on his movies, so there should be something going on in them, somewhere.
“The Brown Bunny” is about an anonymously named motorcycle racer called Bud Clay. He begins the movie in New Hampshire, losing a race, and ends it in Los Angeles, losing his equanimity. Not that he has much. His cross-country road trip is punctuated with brief encounters with women with floral names—Violet, Lilly, Rose—as he seems to be recovering from a break up with childhood sweetheart Daisy. His arrival in LA is marked by his search for Daisy and her appearance at his hotel room. Then the movie ends.
Gallo has chosen to use an extremely slow rhythm for the film, which sort of works, and I’ve liked in other films (I’m looking at you Claire Denis, for one example, and it turns out Gallo worked on one of her films), but by the end, here it feels overused. The opening scene, of him racing on his motorcycle, takes minutes (apparently, the first cut had 28 minutes more or so of like footage, really slowing the action down). There are scenes of driving, of shots out the windshield of the car, of Gallo in blurry profile. It’s all quite beautiful to look at, but what’s it for? Bud is tortured by something, though the acting is a bit clichéd; Bud puts his fingers to his temple, runs a hand through his greasy hair, stares out a window, fidgets with his fingers. We get the idea, even if there’s no character development at all. Still, with little plot, little character development, and the obvious repetition of the bunny motif, I thought, “This movie should have been 30 minutes long.” The drag of time in the film does lend weight to the character’s sadness, and I guess I like the inertia juxtaposed next to a bike racer. Now, as I reflect on the movie, I think I am considering it these past few days because there needs to be more there in order for it to be as significant as it seems. And I think it just isn’t significant. It doesn’t seem real in many ways; somehow, Bud seduces various girls—and the seduction of Cheryl Tiegs, even without makeup, just is laughable—seemingly trying to protect or replicate something, but interactions like these would not happen and it’s not even clear why they do happen. And the epiphany at the end, while surprising to the audience, shouldn’t surprise the character and therefore isn’t really an epiphany. Nothing creates it or brings it about because there’s no conflict; Bud just experiences a conversation that he already has had and expresses something he already knows.
And that’s another problem with the movie. I think that Gallo adopts two techniques that fight each other in the movie. One is the slow pace and the other is seemingly improvised dialogue. And the worst of it occurs with Chloe Sevigney, where lines are repeated as if they are profound, but they are made trite and somewhat ridiculous by their iteration. One review said that the film seemed to be made by a bright film student using his favorite directors’ techniques imperfectly. And I agree with that. I also agree with Ebert in his emendation of his initial review. It’s not a terrible film, he decides. However, he likes the new draft, and I think I just don’t.
Tags: claire denis, gallo, Loewen, the brown bunny
