'Bunny' makes for a long trip

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By Bob Strauss
Los Angeles Daily News

Posted: October 1, 2004

No longer the overindulgent disaster reported at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" has been successfully recut and focused into a merely indulgent misfire. Producer-writer-director-etc. Gallo has made a credible enough movie about a soul in pain. But he hasn't made a very deep or absorbing one, while simultaneously pumping the thing to bursting with narcissism.

Gallo deserves credit for sticking to his minimalist guns, though. Making a movie about an inarticulate guy's inability to cope with profound psychic grief is hard enough. Visualizing a good portion of it as a solo, anti-eventful cross-country drive adds more degrees of difficulty.

After we watch Gallo's Bud Clay race around a motorcycle track in New Hampshire for too long, Bud packs his bike in his dark Dodge van and ambles west. Along the way we get some hints about his background and what's got him so down. We also see an actual brown bunny. It's symbolic.

The film is noteworthy for the movie debut of '70s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. She plays a woman minding her own business at a Midwestern rest stop where Bud uses the Coke machine. He engages her in conversation - "You OK?" - then they make out for a while and he drives off.

But as you've no doubt heard, or at least inferred from that short-lived Sunset Strip billboard, there is only one scene to discuss in all of "The Brown Bunny." In L.A., Bud goes hunting for that lost love, Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), whom he doesn't exactly find but who ends up performing oral sex on him anyway.

We're not supposed to focus on this explicit - and by all angles I saw, actual - sequence at the expense of the film's other artistically significant shots. But, darn it, it is the movie's only climactic moment - pun intended - but also, honestly, dramatically. And after spending most of the film trapped in a van with the morose auteur or watching amateur bit players, it's rather invigorating to see a fearless pro like Sevigny go beyond even her wide previous boundaries - and bring a mighty helping of emotional heft to the proceedings with her.

Or it's just gross. You decide. After all, Gallo has designed "The Brown Bunny" in a way that enables, perhaps even demands, each viewer's mind to wander to its own interpretation as the film rolls toward its unstartling revelation about what's really eating biker Bud. As for what's eating the combative guy who made this self-centeredly strange - but unfortunately not strange enough - existential whimper, that's a different, more interesting movie.