Brenda Vaccaro – Movie Musings

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are an odd couple in the Big Apple in Midnight Cowboy

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Jon Voight (Joe Buck), Dustin Hoffman (Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo), Sylvia Miles (Cass), John McGiver (Mr O’Daniel), Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley), Barnard Hughes (Towny), Bob Balaban (Young Student), Ruth White (Sally Buck), Jennifer Salt (Annie)

Even today it still feels like an odd Best Picture winner: two down-and-outs in the slums of New York, both trying to hustle, develop a strangely symbiotic relationship part brotherly, part semi-romance. It’s even more bizarre when you remember the year before the Academy had given the Big One to the super-safe family-friendly charms of Oliver! Still the only X-rated film to win Best Picture (though it looks hilariously tame for such a rating today), Midnight Cowboy is both the first step towards the fresh, modern film-making of the 70s and also a dated landmark of a particular era of film-making.

Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is the would-be Cowboy, escaping the hum-drum life of dishwashing in a run-down restaurant in Texas (not to mention a backstory darkly hinted at of a childhood of neglect and traumatic sexual encounters of the past) to make the trip to the Big Apple to find a new career – as a gigolo. After all he “ain’t a for-real cowboy. But [he is] one helluva stud”. Sadly making a career of sleeping with rich women for money ain’t half a lot harder to pull off than you might think. Not least when you are quite the naïve rube, certainly compared to more practised hustlers like “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a crippled, seriously ill born-and-bred New York who lives a hand-to-mouth on the streets desperate for each coin he can find. Both hustlers team up to try and make their wealth from Joe’s attractions – but life is tough for the desperate underclass of American society.

Released in 1969, the film stunned the States with Brit John Schlesinger’s insight into the dark underbelly of the American dream. Schlesinger, in a way few film makers before had, focused on the scuzzy poverty of the American loser, the two dreamers who fantasised about turning their lives around into the American ideal, but instead met failure and depression at every turn. This was a million miles from the “poor boy made good” vision of past films, or the sort of Capraesque spin of small-town guys winning out in the big city due to their inherent pluck and honesty. There’s none of that in Midnight Cowboy.

Throw in Schlesinger’s style – the way his camera immerses you in New York with its “on the hoof” immediacy (Schlesinger couldn’t afford to get the streets closed, so simply shot the actors in medium or long-shot in real streets and locations, with real people) – and you got a vision of America you hadn’t seen before. The use of locations gives triumphant shots – Jon Voight emerging head and shoulders above the New Yorkers as he walks through bustling streets – and also moments that hum with authenticity. Most famously Hoffman’s “I’m walkin’ here” outburst when the actor was nearly mowed down by a taxi mid-shot while crossing a road. Midnight Cowboy takes you down in the gutter with these characters, and makes you feel part of their world. When we see the freezing poverty they live-in – in an abandoned apartment block – you practically shiver with them.

Throw in with this Schlesinger’s (and Waldo Salt’s fabulous script) careful and sensitive exploration of the bonds between the two men. Starting as strangers, both Ratso and Joe slowly find themselves drawn together in a symbiotic way that’s part soul mate, part unspokenly romantic. It’s implied throughout that the two characters feel a connection towards each other that they lack both the emotional and intellectual language to understand. But it’s there for the audience to pick up on, even if the sexuality of the two characters is something they seem barely able to understand (Joe’s sexuality is certainly far more fluid than he can even begin to grasp, while Ratso hurls around homosexual slurs so often you can tell he doth protest too much). These characters become inseparable, tending to each other (at one point an ill and soaking Ratso loosely embraces Joe, while Joe uses his shirt to dry his face and hair), sharing dreams and hopes for the future, forming a bond that goes way beyond questions of sexuality. For both of them it’s more than clear that an emotional bond like this is something alien to them both, a connection they have long feared in a cruel world.

Both actors excel in the two roles. Voight – in a career making performance – is understanding as a man who is naïve, easily fooled, caring but distant, who slowly begins to replace his wide-eyed innocence with a greater understanding of himself. Joe is a hopeless hustler – a failure as a seducer of women, and twice reduced to tragically mismanaged male prostitution, a stud who ends up paying his first customer to spare her feelings. The film carefully sketches in a backstory of emotional frigidity which adds context to a character who is charmingly selfish but learns to make a connection with another human being.

Hoffman was equally keen for the role, desperate for a part that would be the polar opposite of Benjamin from The Graduate. While Voight plays with a grounded naturalism and unaffected genuineness, Hoffman’s performance pushes the envelope of quirk. There is no end to the affectation of the role – scruffy, limping, sweaty, loud, twitchy – it’s a show-off of a role, with the moments of emotional vulnerability seized on with an actorly relish. But it still works because, despite it all, Hoffman communicates a genuine empathy and sorrow in the role, and because the performance bounces so well off Voight’s stiller, more balanced work.

The film works less well when it drifts away from this central pairing. The “marks” get short shrift, with the women in particular either hornily manipulative (Sylvia Miles, receiving a generous Oscar nod for five minutes work) or serenely wise (Brenda Vaccaro as a woman with more insight into Joe’s fluidity of sexuality than himself). Joe’s male marks are a tragically ashamed young student (Bob Balaban in an effecting debut) or full of messed up self-loathing (Barnard Hughes).

Similarly, Schlesinger’s directorial flourishes may have looked like modern cinema verite at the time, but don’t half look like dated, heavy-handed touches today. Joe’s backstory – told in wordless sequences with different film stock – not only seem tiresome and alienating but also flimsy in the extreme in their psychological insight. Schlesinger’s satire on the Warholesque arty high-life of New York is heavy handed in the extreme, and its filming style outrageously clunky. The film’s psychological depth is thin and insight often blunted, while Schlesinger’s analysis of character often seems dependent on actors (some overindulged) rather than a true vision.

But despite that, Midnight Cowboy works because the characters are so rich and the insight into the life down-and-outs in New York still feels real. Voight and Hoffman (for all his indulgence) are excellent and the sexless romance between the two characters is intriguing and, by its conclusion, carries real emotional weight. While dated and lacking in as much insight as you might wish, it’s still a film that reflects on the damaging gap between dreams and reality, and the difficulty of casting the former aside.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have fun in Tarantino’s appalling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Rick Dalton), Brad Pitt (Cliff Booth), Margot Robbie (Sharon Tate), Al Pacino (Marvin Schwarz), Emile Hirsch (Jay Sebring), Margaret Quailey (Pussycat), Timothy Olyphant (James Stacy), Julia Butters (Trudi Fraser), Austin Butler (“Tex” Watson), Dakota Fanning (Squeaky), Bruce Dern (George Spahn), Mike Moh (Bruce Lee), Luke Perry (Wayne Maunder), Damian Lewis (Steve McQueen), Brenda Vaccaro (Mary Alice Schwarz), Nicholas Hammond (Sam Wanamaker)

Spoilers: I’ll discuss the film’s final 40 minutes in detail. I mean when you watch it you can guess where it’s going. But those final moments are truly central to my visceral hatred of this film.

There seems to be three eras of Tarantino movies. The first (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) saw him work with pulpy themes focused on strong stories and character development. The second (Kill Bill and Grindhouse) saw him indulge his fascination with the B-movie and low-rent TV of his childhood. His third (Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained) sees him making strange revenge fantasies on behalf of other groups. Once Upon a Time is a marriage between his second and third eras. And I hated it. I hated, hated, hated, hated it. I genuinely can’t remember seeing a film I hated more at the cinema (maybe Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). It’s a self-indulgent, tasteless, overlong, smug, unbearable pile of pleased with itself shit. It’s grotesque and it left me feeling dirty.

The plot (such as it is) follows three days in the lives of fictional Hollywood-turned-TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s best friend, chauffeur and personal assistant who can’t get a job in Hollywood due to his terrible reputation. Dalton lives next door to Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). On Feb 8^th 1969, Dalton is offered a role in spaghetti westerns and preps for his next episodic TV show. On Feb 9^thDalton shoots the pilot of Lancer a new TV western (and a real TV show) as the baddie, suffering a crisis of confidence about his career and talent. Meanwhile Booth does some odd jobs and has an odd encounter with the Manson family. Intercut with this are scenes of Sharon Tate going about her everyday life, including joyfully watching one of her films in the cinema. Finally we join the action after a time jump on August 8^thas, after returning from filming in Italy, Dalton and Booth get drunk and high and accidentally waylay the Manson gang on their way to Sharon Tate’s house and – this being now Tarantino’s thing – brutally and bloodily murder the three Manson family killers.

Sigh. I think a question now has to be asked about what Tarantino’s problem is. As I realised where this film was going, my heart sank. This sort of revenge porn is, I’ll be honest, revolting, demeaning, tasteless and, leaving all else aside, not Tarantino’s place. It also demeans and cheapens the actual tragedies that happened to real people. Just as shots of Hitler’s head being machine-gunned to pieces in Inglorious Basterds while Jewish-American paratroopers machine-gunned a room of Nazi’s seemed to be grossly inappropriate, lowered the victims to the level of the killers and cheapened the actual deaths of real people in the Holocaust, making them seem like weak victims (as well as hardly being Tarantino’s place being neither Jewish or having any connection to the Holocaust) so it’s equally tasteless here. He just about gets away with it in Django Unchained, a black revenge thriller from a director who is not black and has littered his scripts with the “n-word” as all these guys were at least fictional people. But here it’s just grotesque.

We pride ourselves now that we have left the Gladiatorial ring behind, or that we no longer gather round on a Bank Holiday weekend to watch a convicted criminal being hung, drawn and quartered. But as I watched the Manson killers being bludgeoned to death, mutilated by a dog, their Glasgow kissed skulls crushed against a mantelpiece and immolated by flame thrower, I thought we’re not that far off. It’s basically a pornographic level of violence, that the film excuses because the Manson killers were bad guys (don’t get me wrong they were) but asking us to take pleasure in killing, is basically what Manson himself asked his followers to do. I find watching this sort of stuff not only feels like it cheapens the actual brutal, tragic murders of an eight-month pregnant Tate and her three friends, but also lowers me the level of the killers themselves. Tarantino’s films increasingly feel like the director himself would be fully on board with that episode of Black Mirror (“White Bear”) – where a killer is tortured everyday by tourists, and then has her mind wiped so she can go through it every single day – being turned into a reality.

In fact Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a worrying voyage into the man’s soul, and what I saw there was partly this muddled vanity and obsession with revenge (I mean who gives him the right to take revenge on behalf of others? Someone please tell me? There is an arrogance to that I find deeply unattractive), partly the tragically boring geeky tedium of the video-store nerd, mixed with a loving regard for white men and a worrying lack of interest (bordering on contempt) for anyone different.

I loathed and despised the final forty minutes of this film, but to be honest the opening two hours are not a lot better. This film is almost three hours long and contains about thirty minutes of plot if that. What it mostly is, is a chance for Tarantino to indulge to a ludicrous degree his obsession with low-rent culture of the 1950s and 1960s. To show off his knowledge of obscure films of the age (he’s heard of The Night They Raided Minsky’s you know…) and recreate in painstaking detail pastiches of the type of TV shows he grew up watching. These sequences seem to go on forever and ever, with the odd good line and decent gag not suddenly making it anything other than increasingly tedious.

What he really, really, really needs is a collaborator to tell him when less is more and certainly when too much is too much. The first two thirds of the film seem to stretch on for an indulgent eternity, and their content reveals more and more of the director’s obsession. White men are idealised and the old-school values of Hollywood, the world of the studio and simpler non-PC times are looked back on with a fussy nostalgia. The film takes every opportunity for Booth and Dalton to lambast hippie culture and the growing anti-establishment of the era, and has every character we meant to like yearning for the good old days.

Bruce Lee appears in the film, here interpreted as a braggart arsehole, showing off to the stunt men, who is humiliated by Cliff in a brawl. It’s a scene that amuses for a second and then makes you uncomfortably realise you are watching the most prominent non-white person in the film being put into his place by a middle-aged white man. It’s got more than a hint of racism to it. And Tarantino claims to be a fan of Bruce Lee! By contrast, while the film brutally murders the Manson killers, James Stacy (played by Timothy Olyphant here) the chiselled white-male star of Lancer, a man later jailed for repeated child molestation, is treated with a laudatory romance. Guess there are different rules for white guys who starred in Tarantino’s favourite shows. Whither the revenge saga where his victims mutilate him eh?

Women don’t get a better deal in this film. Sharon Tate is essentially an elevated extra, although Tarantino gets one lovely sequence out of her watching her latest film – a playful swinging 60s spy caper with Dean Martin – in a cinema and gleefully enjoying both the film and the audience reaction with a childish, delighted grin. But then a lot of the success of this is due to Robbie’s marvellous performance. Tarantino himself does his best to ruin it with his foot fetish, throwing Margot Robbie’s naked feet into virtually every shot. Aside from this, the film shoots and treats Tate like a teenager observing someone they have a crush on, romantically idealising her without ever getting anyway near understanding her or scratching the surface of her personality, instead following her with doe-eyed devotion.

But at least she gets lines. Every other woman in this is either a slut or murderer (or both) from the Manson cult, a shrew (like Booth’s dead wife and Kurt Russell’s stunt manager’s wife) or a bimbo (like Dalton’s eventual Euro-wife). There is no in between. It’s a film for men, written by a man, where the men take centre-stage, and a smugly held up as never doing anything wrong, with the film uncritically indulging their vices as symptoms of their tragedy of being left behind by a more progressive and changing country.

Both Pitt and DiCaprio enjoy swaggering twists on their images. DiCaprio overacts wildly, in an overly mannered performance full of actorly quirks (he has a stammer so we know he’s a sensitive soul deep down!), that riffs on other performances of his and largely involves shouting and swearing. Even scenes of emotional vulnerability carry a method fakeness about them – but then Once Upon a Time is a film with no heart, so it’s not surprising that when one of its characters tries to show one, the film stumbles spectacularly into artificiality. Pitt fares better, with a performance of McQueen like-cool, even if the film seems to believe that even if Cliff did kill his wife (as many believe) it’s fine because she was clearly a bitch.

All of this is shot with a flatness and lack of visual interest that is surprising for Tarantino, usually a much more vibrant director. Maybe he was just echoing the TV styles at the time. Maybe he was saving the fireworks for his orgy of (what he would call) cathartic violence at the end. Maybe it’s just a pretty mundane film. Maybe if Tarantino wasn’t the film-buffs darling, more people would call out his flatness and lack of imagination behind the camera and the soulless flatness of much of the films shooting and pacing. Its mediocrity and smug wallowing in the culture of yesteryear is appalling.

Because Once Upon a Time is a teenager’s film, and worst of all, a teenage bore. It’s got a major crush on Sharon Tate, but barely any interest in her personality. It drones on endlessly about geeky knowledge and old film and television that no one else knows anything about so that it sounds interesting and cool. It takes a childish, immature, sickening delight in fantasising about killing bad people in the most horrific ways it can possible imagine. It thinks it’s really clever and profound, but it’s actually a horrible, horrible film that’s also really tedious and which leaves a deeply unpleasant taste in the mouth, while demeaning the real-life victims of a crime by spinning some ludicrous revenge fantasy around them. It morally offended me after two hours of boring me. I hated it. I hated it. I really, really, really, really hated it. I hated it so very much.