Buffalo ’66
With Gallo, Christina Ricci, Anjelica Huston, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Corrigan, Mickey Rourke, Roseanna Arquette, and Jan-Michael Vincent.
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On the face of it, the plot makes no sense. Billy Brown (Gallo) gets out of the state penitentiary after taking the rap for a crime he didn’t commit in order to pay off a $10,000 bet on the Super Bowl. Reluctantly he takes the short bus ride back to Buffalo, his hometown: he’s been deceiving his parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara) about his whereabouts for the past five years, claiming that he’s married and has an important government job in Washington, a deceit he’s maintained by getting his only friend, a simpleton he calls Goon (Kevin Corrigan), to post his letters.
How does she respond to this absurdly aggressive demand? She totally acquiesces, making no attempt to rebel or escape. She does set one limit, insisting that she won’t eat meat, but then when his mother winds up serving tripe, Layla wolfs it down with feigned relish; she’s equally obliging when it comes to letting his father grope her. And though Billy continues to treat her contemptuously after they leave the house, she sticks to him like glue for the remainder of the day and even proposes that they check into a motel. (Meanwhile he nurses fantasies of killing the former football player who made him lose the $10,000.) The obverse of her “perfect” behavior is the parents’ grotesque monstrosity: the mother is too preoccupied with a football game to listen to Layla’s carefully crafted account of how she and Billy met, and the father periodically explodes in violent, unmotivated rage.
It isn’t the fault of Gazzara, Huston, and Corrigan–gifted actors all–that they deliver such terrible performances: they have no choice given the lines and scenes they have to work with. You might have sympathy for Gallo as well, if you could forget that he’s responsible for his own lines. His decision to connect every stylistic choice to Billy’s confused and pinched consciousness has a certain boldness. But that’s about its only virtue, because none of the jazzy, eclectic visual effects–the use of reversal film stock, the overhead camera angles, the gratuitous fade-ins and fade-outs, the boxed-in flashbacks, a baroque fantasy interlude with taffylike blood clots–are allowed to work in tandem with one another. Style becomes merely a fluctuating form of decoration set alongside the narcissistic portrait of an irascible lug who can’t bear to be touched because he’s so sensitive, a portrait that’s the one element the movie can’t bring itself to deviate from.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
