Buffalo 66
Directed by Vincent Gallo
Written by Vincent Gallo, Allison Bagnall
Starring Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke, Anjelica Huston
Release Date June 26th, 1998
Published August 11th, 2003
Actor Vincent Gallo courted controversy at the 2003 Cannes Film festival with his latest film, The Brown Bunny. It was called the worst film in the festival’s history and was roundly trashed by Roger Ebert amongst others. Gallo didn't take the rebukes lightly, lashing out at journalists at the film’s press conference and later chastising Ebert and calling him a fat pig. This is not the intelligent discourse one attributes to a great artist. Despite Gallo's horrible attitude and childish behavior at Cannes, he is undeniably an artist, as he showed with his most famous directorial outing, 1997's fresh oddball love story Buffalo 66.
The Buffalo of the title is Buffalo New York where our pseudo hero Billy Brown (Gallo) was born and raised until he went to prison. As we meet him Billy is leaving prison and headed home to Buffalo. Poor Billy desperately needs to use the restroom after his long bus ride, but finds every bathroom either out of service or locked until finally he wanders into a dance studio. Even then, an odd encounter with a male student causes Billy the inability to go. Instead, he uses a payphone to call his mother to tell her he's coming home.
Billy never told his parents he went to jail, his Byzantine excuse for his disappearance includes working for the government and a fictional wife. Desperate to appease his mother Billy decides to kidnap Layla (Christina Ricci), a dance student who just happened to overhear Billy's conversation with his mother. The abduction isn't very violent or frightening for Layla who seems to take this odd occurrence and even Billy's raging hostility in stride.
Once arriving at Billy's home, Layla is told that her new name is Wendy and that her only job is to make him look good to his parents, a task she takes to with relish.
Billy's parents Jan (Angelica Huston) and Jimmy (Ben Gazzara) are quite the odd couple. Mom is an obsessive Bills football fan whose photo albums contain only photos of Bills players and the one picture of her son is difficult to find. Billy's Dad is a former lounge singer who even serenades Layla in a strange almost dreamlike sequence. Angelica Huston has the film’s most telling and dramatic moment when she off handedly explains the film’s title.
Layla/Wendy does everything she can to make Billy look good to Mom and Dad, telling them about Billy's job with the CIA and his covert activities in the spy world. It isn't until she tells them that she’s pregnant that she gets their attention away from the Bills game.
While at the parent’s house, Billy calls his best friend Goon (Kevin Corrigan) and we learn the details of how Billy went to jail and his plans now that he is out. Billy it seems lost a great deal of money on the Bills Super Bowl loss to the Giants. He paid his debt to his bookie (played in a small cameo by Mickey Rourke) by confessing to a crime committed by one of the bookie's associates. Now that he's out Billy is going to get revenge, not on the bookie but on the Bills kicker who missed the game winning field goal.
That may seem like an actual plot but Buffalo 66 never settles into a conventional narrative. Instead, Gallo, who also wrote and directed the film, prefers to simply observe his characters and their reactions to the strange circumstances surrounding them. He employs a unique visual style, very gritty at times then straying into dream sequences that include musical interludes and a tap dance by Ricci. These flights of visual and narrative fancy are a welcome change from the downer story. Not that it's a bad story, it's very unique.
It is Ricci who carries much of the film with her sympathetic eyes and endearing sweetness, not to mention a weird quality that makes her character’s willingness to stick with Billy and even fall in love with seem perfectly natural. Characters thrust into the situation her character is in are supposed to be frightened and attempting to escape and other very correct and conventional reactions. Then again, there is nothing conventional about Buffalo 66
