Ryan Magner

Vincent Gallo Goes Catatonic for The Brown Bunny

I loved Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ‘66, and so I thought I’d give another of his movies a shot. The Brown Bunny was what I found, completely directed, written, and produced by Vincent Gallo. He also managed to be the Director of Photography while also being on camera the whole time. He’s kind of a credit hog. All I knew going into this film was what I skimmed through on the Netflix envelope: Bud Clay, played by Gallo, has to get to California from New Hampshire and tries to forget his one true love on the way.

Forgetting love is a grueling chore, and The Brown Bunny conveys exactly that fact. The downside for a first time viewer is that it might be a grueling chore to sit through the film with very little hints as to what the motives are behind the main character’s actions.
Clay, played by Gallo, almost literally has his head hanging low the entire film, and hardly has any dialogue. Up until the end of the film, The Brown Bunny is mostly about what you don’t actually see on screen. Because all you see is road after road and gas station after gas station.

From the start Clay is in a near catatonic depression. When picking up a convenience store clerk named Violet he speaks very quietly, “Please? …Please?…Please come with me?” Most girls would refuse, or call the cops. But at the point when she agreed, I began to believe that Gallo may have a thing for submissive female characters (a la Christina Ricci as Layla in Buffalo ‘66). And so Violet goes with him, just to be ditched at her own house when he tells her to go get her things. Clay repeats this process of hanging out with a girl for hours or minutes, then leaving. He’s looking for that perfect flower to replace Daisy, the love he wants to forget. But with each encounter he knows within hours, or minutes, it’s no use and they find themselves abandoned by him.

Clay visits the home of Daisy and is greeted by an old woman who is presumed to be Daisy’s mother, but is old enough to be her grandmother. Again, everyone is catatonic. Clay has to introduce himself as the boy who used to live next door and played with Daisy. She says her daughter hasn’t called in years, and Clay has no response other than to hang his head. You either think he knows why or just think he’s doing what he has been doing, being depressed. This is mostly a confusing encounter, but could serve as a tell to the truth in the end.

There’s a great scene after Clay loses his composure while driving. He drives up to a place called the “Bonneville Salt Flats” and rides his racing bike straight out as far as we can see. At this scene you truly start to understand what he is doing: Seeking any thrills just to forget.

The Brown Bunny was originally 118 minutes, and this cut was about 90 minutes. Gallo cut out 30 minutes after his film was received as possibly the worst film in Cannes history. After Roger Ebert stated that Gallo’s film was the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, Gallo retaliated by calling him a fat-pig with the physique of a slave-trader. After which Ebert stated:

It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of “The Brown Bunny.”

But Roger Ebert does say that after the cut, the film becomes much better than what he saw at Cannes.

However boring it might come off, with it’s long long-shots and minor dialogue, I found something in it. The way the story works is you have to watch the whole film and see where Bud Clay has been before it pays off in the last ten minutes to understand everything that came before it.

The last scene, which might be considered pornographic to most, doesn’t feel erotic at all. Daisy appears in the hotel room, and the actions that follow are used as a tool to show what Clay feels about Daisy. It reveals incredible sexual and emotional guilt about what happened to her. We are shown footage of Daisy at a party, and this is where the entire preceding movie that is sitting in your brain gains it’s meaning. Suddenly there are parts of the film of which you realize the reality. Including the final sexually explicit scene.

This is a reported quote from Gallo after Cannes, via Roger Ebert’s website:

A day after the fiasco of the movie’s premiere, Screen International ran a remarkable interview in which Gallo apologized for his film, calling it “a disaster and a waste of time,” and adding, “I apologize to the financiers of the film, but I must assure you it was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film.” He added that the official screening “was the worst feeling I ever had in my life,” and said he would never watch the film again.

I don’t believe for a second that Gallo actually hated his own film. I found an interview he did on Howard Stern where he said he was brutally misquoted, and that the film submitted to Cannes was unfinished. Hence the 90 minute released cut versus the 118 minute festival cut. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t get it finished in time for the festival, but it seems he got paid his dues after he finished editing it.

After the re-edit, it began to receive it’s praise. Even from Roger Ebert:

Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a quarter of the running time. And in the process he transformed it. The film’s form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective. It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of The Brown Bunny, it is its salvation.

Shot on 16mm handhelds and blown up to 35mm, the film has a grainy homemade look. For handheld shooting, it was impressive. Gallo’s near silent performance was almost jarring compared to his chatty role in Buffalo ‘66. When he did speak in The Brown Bunny he was always pathetic. I don’t mean from an acting standpoint, but from the character standpoint. From an acting standpoint he was absolutely heartbreaking, and completely successful.

This film would be tough to sit through for most of today’s viewership. Most would say it’s a film where nothing happens, because you have to do a lot of thinking with yourself while watching. That’s precisely the point of this film. What else can Clay do besides think about Daisy? Drive and drive and drive. Keeping the reveal at the very end is really the only way to do this, with minor hints that only begin 40 minutes in. But the flip-side, putting the reveal at the start of the film, is you would have 15 or so minutes of engaging footage and the rest of the movie would just drag you down a bottomless pit with Clay until he gets driven into madness.

The credits rolled and I was stuck with this nasty feeling that I knew what Clay had felt, and I related to fears of what actually happened to him and Daisy. I read that in the original cut, there were 6 minutes of black screen and music. I wish it was kept in the final edit, because as the audience I needed this to let everything sink and allow myself to unwind. A lot more people can relate to this film than they might think on first glance, but they’d probably be reluctant to admit it.