Dull at first, 'Brown Bunny' leaps to life

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By Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star

Posted: October 1, 2004

It's not normal to recommend a movie that's ridiculously, agonizingly dull for its first 70 minutes, but the plotless "The Brown Bunny" defies normalcy.

A savage and piercing indie film from Vincent Gallo, its writer, director and star, "The Brown Bunny" slogs through most of its running time, leaving the viewer in the dark about its intentions. We suffer through numbing, grainy sequences of a lonely man driving cross country, stopping for gas, changing his clothes, getting some more gas and visiting old acquaintances. The urge to walk out of the theater is palpable.

And then comes the final act, which unleashes a waterfall of pent-up emotion and lingering secrets, and the grating body of the film is not only justified but redeemed. By sticking in your seat and hearing the piece out, you realize that Gallo's emotional punch wouldn't have been anywhere near as severe had it not been preceded by aching mundanity. Gallo made us suffer so we would feel the same way as his character, motorcycle racer Bud Clay, whose mind is considerably maligned and depressed by a hidden factor.

At the end, we feel the same jubilant release and stinging pain as Bud, and we feel the chill of a cold secret he's kept from himself for years. "The Brown Bunny" is a daring experiment made good. Its fatal flaws are also its greatest assets. This is a movie to watch, analyze and absorb, although "The Brown Bunny" isn't a movie you watch so much as survive.

Gallo, the artist behind the devastatingly intense "Buffalo '66" (1998), his signature debut opus of personal loathing, disconnect and redemption, continues to develop his crazily distinct voice. His talent for drawing on inner pain and splashing dark corners of the soul onto a cinematic canvas is daunting.

"The Brown Bunny," named for the pet of Bud's former lover, hops into theaters after a disastrous buildup. The graphic shot of oral sex between Gallo and Chloë Sevigny made scandalous headlines before the film was even released. An earlier 119-minute cut played at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival to a hail of boos and hisses. The press savaged the film, and Roger Ebert called it the worst film in the history of Cannes (he gave the edited version "thumbs up"). There were reports, later denied by Gallo, that he felt so ashamed of the film that he apologized to the public.

It's painful to imagine the two-hour-long version of the film, since the majority of the slimmed-down movie is still barely tolerable.

A repetitive, distant motorcycle racing sequence opens the film. One of the losers takes off his helmet, and we follow him to a convenience store, where he starts a conversation with a clerk that leads to her agreeing to tag along with him on a road trip to California. The woman won't last long. Bud is too stuck on memories of Daisy (Sevigny), his lost love.

Long, static shots from behind Bud's head focus on the grinding road, and the camera focuses on minor, seemingly insignificant details of life's lonely grind. Bud seems to be a hard, angry man, but he reveals a softer side whenever he's near rabbits, which he refers to only as "bunnies." Eyes lighted up, he observes a bunny at a senile old couple's house and obsesses over cubicle-caged bunnies at a pet shop.

The connection between Bud and the bunnies - which is gradually hinted at in bits, then blossoms at the end - is the great mystery of the film. Getting to the cathartic climax is worth suffering the hard trek on the road.