Every crossover indie auteur got the chance to adapt their favorite “unfilmable” book in the 1990s: David Cronenberg did Naked Lunch, Terry Gilliam Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and, most ignominiously, Gus Van Sant had a crack at Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. I haven’t read the novel, so I’m not sure how faithful the film is — the dialogue is stilted enough to be verbatim — but by all accounts Van Sant’s version is quite a bit less high-spirited and satirical, more laconic and moody, than its original. Robbins’ book, like many another counterculture favorite, is a paean to the hitchhiker’s “freedom and movement,” but if Cowgirls resembles any other road movie it’s probably David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, which is about as claustrophobic and ungroovy as the genre gets. For the most part, then, Cowgirls is a botch, being dull and unfunny (I think it’s supposed to be funny) as well as pretentious as all hell. The parts of the film that might work are sabotaged by Uma Thurman’s awful, awful Southern accent; she’s much better when she stares silent and moony at some jabbering weirdo, an Alice in the American wonderland, which is thankfully most of the time she’s onscreen. The all-not-quite-star cast (Lorraine Bracco! Pat Morita! Crispin Glover! Roseanne!) is interestingly idiosyncratic, but nobody really registers as more than an oddity, and casting Rain Phoenix as Thurman’s love interest was a sentimental folly to rival putting Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III. (The film is dedicated to River Phoenix, who starred in Van Sant’s previous feature My Own Private Idaho, and died in 1993.)
Still, Cowgirls has a few claims to fame, as the world’s only lesbian Western (though it was a little literal-minded to get k.d. lang to do the soundtrack), a beautiful photographic record of the Oregon countryside, and the strangest film in Van Sant’s generally heterogeneous filmography. It also captures something interesting about The Sixties (well, technically the seventies: the novel was published in 1976 and set in ‘73), or maybe about the way a person of a certain generation tends to remember them: wistfully, sure, but also with a certain skepticism and overall feeling of disbelief. In this it anticipates Todd Haynes’ much more successful I’m Not There, which discloses the same weird mix of blissed-out and bothered, like the observations of the one semi-sober kid at a peyote party. The scene that best captures this affect comes towards the end, where Thurman watches fellow rebel cowgirl (played by Victoria Williams — remember her?) through a hole in her grilled cheese sandwich as the latter sums up her personal philosophy of life: “Don’t worry. Be happy. Be here now.” To his infinite credit, Van Sant doesn’t buy this (and neither should you): even bohos can call bullshit. But he kind of loves her for saying it anyway.
by Evan Kindley | Source: IFC Network Airing
11 Dec 2008 6:48 PM | Submit Comment
