Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

After the critical acclaim of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), filmmaker Gus Van Sant parlayed his newly-acquired clout within the film industry to realize one of his dream projects – an adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This 1976 novel about the freewheeling adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a young woman with enormously large thumbs that give her a preternatural ability to hitchhike through life. Robbins deftly used magic realism to tackle topics such as free love, feminism, drugs, animal rights, and religion, among others.

In 1977, Tom Robbins autographed Gus Van Sant’s copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and the future filmmaker vowed one day to adapt it into a film. Producer Robert Wunsch optioned the book and in April, 1977, hired screenwriter Stephen Geller to adapt it. This option expired a year later and actor Shelley Duvall bought the rights. In 1980, Warner Brothers hired her to write and star in a film version, for which she even wrote a screenplay, but nothing came of it. “One studio told me, ‘Too quirky even for us,’ and I had toned it down quite a lot!” She lost the option to Daryl Hannah. Let’s take a moment to contemplate what Duvall’s version would have been like…with her unconventional looks and style of acting, she might have been an excellent choice to play Sissy.

Jump to May 1990 and TriStar Pictures had the rights, hiring Van Sant to direct Cowgirls. Two years later, the studio put the project on hold after deciding that the material may not be accessible enough for mainstream audiences. In August of 1992, the rights moved over to Fine Line Features, who agreed to produce Van Sant’s adaptation for $9 million. Shooting began in September, in New York City.

When it was announced that Van Sant would write and direct the adaptation, it seemed like the ideal marriage between filmmaker and source material. His depictions of Bob’s (Matt Dillon) drug-induced daydreams in Drugstore Cowboy and Mike’s (River Phoenix) surreal, narcoleptic dreams in Idaho suggested that he was the perfect filmmaker to bring Cowgirls’ unique brand of hippie-tinged flights of fancy to life.

After Idaho, everyone wanted to work with Van Sant; he cashed in his cool clout to populate Cowgirls with cameos from the likes of Roseanne Arnold, Buck Henry, Carol Kane, and William S. Burroughs, while also casting prior collaborators Keanu Reeves, Grace Zabriskie, and Udo Kier. He even got k.d. lang, hot off her internationally lauded 1992 album, Ingénue, to create the soundtrack. In the central role of Sissy, he cast then-up-and-coming actor Uma Thurman, who had gotten good notices for her performances in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Henry & June (1990) and, a year later, would strike it big in Pulp Fiction (1994).

Cowgirls screened at the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival where it was savaged by critics. This prompted Van Sant to recut the film before its release in theaters where it was subsequently mauled by critics, grossing only $1.7 million off an $8.5 million budget. Where did it all go wrong for Van Sant, who had been such a critical darling prior to Cowgirls? Had he merely misunderstood the source material? Was it simply another case of a book that could not be adapted into a film? Most importantly, is Cowgirls any good?

Right out of the gate, Van Sant introduces Sissy in two scenes featuring cameos by Buck Henry and Roseanne, which was a mistake. We are trying to get a handle on who Sissy is and where she’s coming from, only to be distracted by these instantly recognizable celebrities. These cameos take one out of the film at the crucial moment we are meant to be learning about Sissy’s origin story. She finds that her large thumbs give her the uncanny ability to hitch rides from anyone and uses this power to satisfy her wanderlust. Like Mike from Idaho, Sissy comes from a troubled past and seeks to find a new family that will love her as she is. Sissy, however, is not a tragic character like Mike, finding hope and promise in the open road, speaking passionately about it: “Moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately…I have the rhythms of the universe inside of me. I am in a state of grace.”

Among the eccentric characters she crosses paths with is The Countess (a flamboyant John Hurt), a rich, New York-based transvestite that gave her numerous modeling assignments years ago when she first left home. The film shifts gears and spins its wheels for a spell when he sets her up with Julian (Reeves), an artist with an entourage of pretentious sycophants played by none other than Sean Young, Carol Kane, Ed Begley, Jr., and the inimitable Crispin Glover. In an odd and uncomfortable scene, the latter shows up sporting a horrible combover and proceeds to compare the size and shape of Young and Thurman’s breasts. This does little, however, to distract from the unfortunate decision to cast Keanu Reeves as a Mohawk Indian, complete with dark skin.

After this mercifully brief episode, The Countess gives Sissy her first modeling assignment in years: go out west to Oregon and film a commercial for two of his feminine hygiene products, with a group of whooping cranes, while they perform their mating ritual in the background. He warns her, however, to stay away from the cowgirls that populate the nearby Rubber Rose Ranch, a health spa for wealthy women. This is easily the weakest part of the film. Hurt’s cartoonish queen, complete with exaggerated pratfall when Sissy hits him, appears to be acting in a completely different movie.

Miss Adrian (Angie Dickinson) runs the ranch and is at odds with the young cowgirls, led by the bullwhip-wielding Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) and her young charge, Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix). The film comes to life once Bonanza and Sissy meet. The cowgirls are unhappy with their working conditions and decide to take over the ranch by force. The reasons behind the takeover are as much about protecting as are protesting, specifically the endangered whooping cranes, who, like the cowgirls, are being threatened by the ruling patriarchy (i.e. the government). The cowgirls are protective of the birds and use them to protest the rule of masculinity that has kept them subservient for many years.

When the revolt begins, Sissy flees to higher ground and meets The Chink (Noriyuki "Pat" Morita), a Japanese-American quasi-religious guru. He tells her about the simple pleasures of life. Initially, he comes across as more holy fool than holy man but there is a method to his madness.

Uma Thurman is well cast as Sissy. In addition to her ethereal beauty she is also able to convey the earnest passion of her character. Her approach to wide-eyed, irrepressible positivity – is similar to what Johnny Depp did with filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), but not as extremely stylized…and not as well-written. Thurman’s approach portrays Sissy as incredibly naïve, which would go against her years in the modeling industry and a lifetime of hitchhiking. She’s seen and experienced too much to have such a naïve world view. I think Thurman is opting to play Sissy and as an eternally earnest optimist, always believing the best in everyone she meets. 

Rain Phoenix has a natural presence in front of the camera with her big, expressive eyes. However, Van Sant saddles her with a lot of clunky, expositional dialogue that sounds like she is giving her dissertation about cowgirls for a Masters program, often delivered in stiff, wooden fashion by the inexperienced actor. Once we get past her awkwardly-written dialogue, the chemistry between her and Uma works its magic as their two characters fall in love.

Cowgirls screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 1993 to a disastrous critical reaction. Fine Line cancels the film’s November 3 release to allow Van Sant to re-edit the film. After the screening, Van Sant realized, “There wasn’t a focus on specific characters,” and had issues with “pacing and construction of the story.” It was a wakeup call for the filmmaker about its problems:

“Everyone liked the movie within our creative group, all parties were really happy with it and no one said it needed work. No red flags went up. It wasn’t until we had a chance to see it with an audience that we first heard feedback and got a different response than what we thought.”

Producer Laurie Parker said that the first cut was too episodic: “It was kind of like the greatest hits of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You’d have to make it like Berlin Alexanderplatz to present all of Robbins’ digressions. As it was, we ended up going back to our original idea of focusing on Sissy and the cowgirls.” Author Robbins’ sticking point with the film was Sissy’s thumbs:

“I suggested that he change the size of Sissy’s thumbs from scene to scene. I used 30 or 40 metaphors to describe Sissy’s thumbs, ranging in size from a cucumber to a baseball bat, so that each reader could decide what they looked like. If there’s anything I don’t like about having the book filmed, it’s that the thumbs are pinned down to a specific size.”

Van Sant cut down the New York scenes, including Sissy’s relationship with Julian, in favor of more time spent on the Rubber Rose Ranch, with more attention paid to the relationship between Sissy and Bonanza. He also cut out an entire subplot involving the enigmatic Clock People, keepers of the keys of cosmic consciousness. Sissy getting pregnant by the Chink was also excised, only a shot near the end of the film of Sissy’s child in the womb remaining to note its occurrence.

This process was nothing new for Van Sant, who re-edited Drugstore Cowboy after the film’s distributors saw the first cut, and My Own Private Idaho, which took at least six months to edit. “This is a standard journey for me. It just took longer than usual this time,” he said. Nevertheless, the April 12, 1994 release date was moved to April 29, only to be postponed again to May 20. The official reason was that too many movies were coming out that weekend.

Roger Ebert kicked off the film's overwhelming negative reception by giving it a half of a star out of four. He wrote, "What I am sure of is that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness." In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, "The central problem is Sissy. Uma Thurman looks the part. But she has a strained backwoods Virginia accent and is carried along by a script that tries to cram in so much of Sissy's life that she careers from one city to another without becoming more than a character sketch."

The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote, "Bereft of atmosphere, or even coherence, the movie becomes an episodic parade of goofballs, eccentrics and lesbians whose lives and purposes are barely outlined. Sissy and company deserve better than this." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Though it is possible to pin various philosophical labels on Cowgirls, loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote, "The patronizing archness of Cowgirls seems directed, finally, at the audience itself – at anyone who expects a movie to add up to something humane and involving."

The inherent problem any filmmaker faces with adapting a novel is that everyone who reads it – including them – has their own unique take on it that is different from others. When someone attempts to visualize their experience of the source material, they risk alienating others who didn’t have the same experience. Then there is a book like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that is chock-a-block with fantastical, metaphysical and philosophical elements that are hard to translate visually.

 

SOURCES

Eller, Claudia. “Cutting Room Corral.” Los Angeles Times. October 14, 1993.

Grimes, William. “How to Fix a Film at the Very Last Minute (or Even Later).” The New York Times. May 15, 1994.

Kempley, Rita. “The Thumbprint of Gus Van Sant. Cowgirls Director Ropes a Bum Steer.” The New York Times. May 19, 1994.

Kilday, Gregg. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: From Book to Film.” Entertainment Weekly. May 20, 1994.

Kort, Michele. “Shelley Duvall Grows Up.” Los Angeles Times. December 15, 1991.

Rochlin, Margy. “Shelley Duvall.” Los Angeles Times. March 9, 1986.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam once remarked in an interview that "when times are bad, I can't believe you can live without fantasy or imagination." This statement seems particularly valid in contemporary society when you realize all of the horrible things that are occurring. One only has to look in the newspapers or watch the news on television to see how rapidly society seems to be collapsing. Gilliam's statement becomes all the more true when you look at the success of a film like Forrest Gump (1994), which is beloved by many who see it as a hopeful reminder of better times. The problem with that film is that it is too literal in its fantastic elements, leaving little to the imagination. This is the strength of Gilliam's films – from his work with Monty Python to his own films – which transport the viewer to another world altogether. But this does not mean his films leave behind all traces of reality, but rather, like any good fairy tale, they play with and manipulate reality. To this end, watching a film like Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) is akin to reading one of those great fairy tales from your childhood. His film is the cinematic equivalent of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series or J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy in its ability to tell a good story, present colorful and unusual characters, and take us to places we can only dream about. And like these books, the film is set on an epic scale, spanning all realms, from the legendary city of Constantinople, to the Moon, to the insides of a giant sea monster.

Our story begins in the 18th Century, during The Age of Reason where a small, beleaguered town, ruled by an evil, bureaucratic Governor (Jonathan Pryce), is under constant attack from an equally cruel Sultan and his large army of Turks. Caught in the middle is an inept theatrical company trying in vain to entertain the battle-weary soldiers and shell-shocked villagers of the town with the fantastic tales of Baron Munchausen. During a performance, an old soldier appears, claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen and aims to not only set the record straight about his outrageous exploits, but save the town from the Turks. This sets in motion an epic adventure which has the Baron (John Neville) traveling the world and beyond for his former comrades, an eccentric group that includes Berthold (Eric Idle), a man who can run so fast that he must attach a ball and chain to both legs, Adolphus (Charles McKeown), a sharpshooter capable of hitting "a bullseye half way around the world," Albrecht (Winston Dennis), the strongest man in the world, and Gustavus (Jack Purvis), a small man who not only has unearthly hearing abilities, but can "blow over a whole forest with just one breath." However, the Baron faces many obstacles from the outset of his adventure. He is old and feeble with the specter of death literally and figuratively pursuing him in all sorts of guises, but most notably as a horrific, winged, skeletal demon. Only his love of adventure and the help of his youthful companion, a little girl named Sally Salt (Sarah Polley), keeps Death at bay and his quest on track.

The idea for Baron Munchausen had been running around inside Gilliam's head for some time. He had always liked the 1962 Czechoslovakian film version and the various stories about the famed teller of tall tales. But it wasn't until he had finished his previous film, Brazil (1984), did Baron Munchausen become a viable project. Gilliam had fought Universal studio to release his version of Brazil and not the one they wanted – a more upbeat "Hollywood" ending. Gilliam, exhausted and jaded, was anxious to put that horrible experience behind him. And so, he and producer Arnon Milchan approached 20th Century Fox, pitched the idea for the film, and got the go-ahead from the studio. But then disaster struck. After Brazil, Gilliam and Milchan parted company and Fox lost interest in the project because the people who had made the deal were no longer there. However, Gilliam had going on at that moment and continued to work on Baron Munchausen. The source of this momentum stemmed from Gilliam's desire to finish what he saw as his "fantasist" trilogy: Time Bandits (1981) featured a young boy as-fantast, while Brazil presented an adult as fantast theme, and Baron Munchausen would complete the series with an old man as fantast.

Gilliam finally acquired financial support from Columbia Pictures and began writing the script for the film with his good friend and screenwriter, Charles McKeown (they had worked to get together previous on Brazil). They used the book, Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia as their starting point. Written by Rudolph Erich Raspe and published in 1785, it was based on the inflated exploits of a real German cavalry officer. Gilliam found that the book was merely a series of tales with no narrative connection and so he and McKeown created a story about a town under siege with a group of actors trapped in it, trying to perform The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, only to have the real Baron showing up. There had already been two dozen screen versions of the Baron's endeavors in Europe alone. In addition George Melies had done a silent short, and two films, a German one filmed in 1948 and the aforementioned Czech feature in 1962, were in circulation when Gilliam decided to create his own take on the man. In writing the script, he and McKeown would talk about the scenes in detail and then McKeown would go off and write. Then, they would meet again and talk about what he wrote and the process would repeat itself.

These were the least of his problems. Gilliam had difficulty casting someone in the title role, but one person's name kept popping up – John Neville. At the time, Neville, a veteran British stage actor whose heyday was during the 1960s but had faded from the limelight over the years. He had become the director of the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival doing 15 productions a season with no time for films. Gilliam approached Neville’s agent and was turned down. Luckily for Gilliam, a makeup lady working on the film knew Neville’s daughter personally, called him up, and arranged a meeting. It turned out that the veteran stage actor was a big Monty Python fan and he agreed to do the film.

Unfortunately, Gilliam's headaches did not end there. The studio forced him to begin production before he was ready and as the filming progressed, the usual budget problems began to rear their ugly heads. Principal photography began on September 14, 1987 at Rome’s legendary Cinecitta Studios (where Fellini had shot his films). After seven weeks of filming, the production was shut down for two weeks with rumors that Gilliam would be replaced by Richard Fleischer or Gary Nelson (The Black Hole). The studio threatened to replace Gilliam if he didn't get back on track. He had to convince the film’s completion bond insurer, Film Finances that he was in control of the project’s increasing budget. This forced Gilliam to cut out portions of the script but he could not decide what to keep and what to remove. Two days before the deadline, Film Finances threatened to sue Gilliam for fraud and this upset McKeown so much that he and the director went through the script in less than an hour and came up with revisions that appeased the financiers. Ironically, despite all of the script revisions they made, and the presence of Film Finances, the budget increased, the filming didn’t move any faster, and the sets weren’t built any quicker. According to Thomas Schuhly, one of the film’s many producers, there was no danger that Gilliam would have been fired: “You must accept the rules of the game, and that’s to make money, not to lose it. We had a better chance of making money with Terry than anyone else.”

Gilliam wanted to make the film in Rome because it gave him the opportunity to work with legendary Fellini collaborators, production designer Dante Ferretti and director of photography Giuseppe Rotunno. However, working in Italy presented its own unique set of problems. "This film was terrifying difficult, even before those other pressures from the studio began. The fact that the film was falling apart at the seams was bad enough – the organization was terrible,” Gilliam said. In retrospect, he regretted filming there because they were ill-equipped to do special effects films and his crew were speaking four different languages: English, Italian, German and Spanish. This resulted in miscommunication among crew members. Gilliam said, “The moment you say something it’s instantly mistranslated.” Gilliam became bogged down by the slow pace of Italian filmmaking and their unusual working methods. Gilliam and Ferretti redesigned the film several times with certain locations in mind only to find out after several weeks that no one sought permission to use them. They had to start all over again.

Due to delays and studio demands, the King of the Moon character was recast with Robin Williams replacing Sean Connery. The budget constraints forced Gilliam and McKeown to reduce the Moon sequence from a world of 2,000 people with detachable heads to only two people. When this happened, Connery lost interest and left the project. Eric Idle was good friends with Williams, who just happened to be in Rome at the time promoting Good Morning Vietnam (1987). Gilliam had actually offered him the role of Vulcan but he wasn’t available until they had to recast the King of the Moon and he agreed to help out. The role of Vulcan had originally been written for Bob Hoskins but he was busy making Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and Gilliam cast Oliver Reed instead.

Talk about being born under a bad sign. For months, the production trained horses for Baron Munchausen and then, just before going to Spain to film, there was an outbreak of horse fever and they could not bring them. In addition, the two dogs playing the Baron’s pooch came down with a liver complaint at the same time. A few days later, then Columbia studio head David Puttnam was fired. By the time the production got to Spain, the costumes hadn’t arrived because there wasn’t enough room on the plane to take them! Somehow Gilliam prevailed and finished the film with the help of good friends like Eric Idle providing support and a sense of humor. Gilliam remembered, "At one point, we were out in Spain, and things were at their very, very worst. I was ready to quit. I knew there was no way we would get through the film. Eric really came in there, saying, 'You've got to, if for no other reason, you must make this film to spite John Cleese!' That got me going!"

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was generally well-received by mainstream critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “The special effects are astonishing, but so is the humor with which they are employed … These adventures, and others, are told with a cheerfulness and a light touch that never betray the time and money it took to create them.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “With their remarkable contributions, Baron Munchausen is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “A few episodes test the viewer's patience, and there is considerably more wit in the film's sumptuous design than in its dialogue. But anyone with an educated eye and a child's love of hyperbole can take delight in Gilliam's images and incidents.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Thanks to such contradictions, the movie’s overall movement often seems closer to that of a boiling cauldron than to any logical progression. But this wild spectacle has an energy, a wealth of invention, and an intensity that for my money still puts most of the streamlined romps of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to shame … A fantasy in which literally anything can happen at any moment runs the serious risk of flying apart without a center; and there is hardly a moment in this movie’s 126 minutes when Gilliam isn’t taking that risk — both eyes open and full speed ahead.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe felt that Gilliam had “created another brilliantly inventive epic of fantasy and satire.”

With a budget estimated to be in the $40-45 million range (which sounds pretty small now but back then that was a big deal), Baron Munchausen harkens back to Gilliam's love of old epic "special effects movies" like The Sea Hawk (1940) and Thief of Baghdad (1940), which the filmmaker enjoyed as a child. As a result, Baron Munchausen is a stunning visual masterpiece on a grand scale that depicts all sorts of flights of fancy: characters ride cannonballs through the air, get swallowed whole by monstrous whales, and fly to the moon in a hot air balloon. Everything is set on an absurd mythical level that at times becomes wonderfully surreal. This is particularly evident in a remarkable sequence where the Baron and Sally travel to the moon. At first, it seems that the Baron's ship is adrift along a calm stretch of the ocean, but this gradually changes to the surface of the moon, a barren landscape where the constellations come alive, becoming what they are. One of the joys of Baron Munchausen is that every scene is filled with this kind of atmospheric, incredible attention to detail that sets it apart from any other feature you're likely to see.

As in all of Gilliam's films the large ensemble cast fills out their respective roles admirably. John Neville brings all of his knowledge and years of experience as an actor to the role of the Baron and makes what could have been a wacky caricature, a flesh and blood character. He has to perform the daunting task of portraying the Baron in three different stages of his life: young, middle-aged, and as an old man. Sarah Polley is the perfect foil for Neville's Baron. When he becomes tired and fed up with the quest to save the town from the Turks, she is there to inject some youth and vitality into the struggle, renewing everyone's energy without smugly mugging to the camera as so many child stars are seem prone to do nowadays. The rest of the supporting cast is also superb with Eric Idle and Uma Thurman (as Venus the Goddess of Love) creating memorable scenes with their characters. To top it all off there is even an uncredited cameo by a delightfully unhinged Robin Williams as the King of the Moon who bounces from lunacy to lucidity with the frequency of a schizophrenic on speed and who is also not averse to lobbing giant asparagus spears at our heroes. He would subsequently star in Gilliam's next effort, The Fisher King and expand on the trilogy with a fourth option: crazed man as fantast.

If there is a central theme to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, it is the notion that fantasy and fun complement science and reason. When the Baron first appears, he is an old man that feels pushed to the margins of a world he can no longer relate to. "The world is evidently tired of me," he says, "because it's all logic and reason now. Science. Progress. Laws of Hydraulics. Laws of Social Dynamics. Laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged Cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me." The film not only becomes a battle against the Sultan and his army, but against the stifling sterility of science and reason as represented by the corrupt Governor of the town (an wonderfully campy performance by Jonathan Pryce, who goes all out with his role) who sees a world "fit for science and reason," and not for the "folly of fantasists who do not live in the real world." And yet, Gilliam's film shows that you cannot have one without the other. As he once said in an interview, "Fantasy and reality, or truth and reality – whatever form it takes – that which the world perceives as truth, and that which really is truth. I like the idea that a good lie is probably better than what appears to be the truth – and maybe even more truthful!" Baron Munchausen constantly plays with these notions of fantasy and reality, constantly manipulating them throughout the film to keep us guessing. Eventually, it no longer matters as both blend together to form a new reality where one is not sacrificed for the other, but rather both co-exist peacefully.

SOURCES

Johnson, Kim Howard. “’True Facts’ About the World’s Greatest Lies.” Starlog. March 1989.

Johnson, Kim Howard. “Terry Gilliam’s Marvelous Travels and Companions.” Starlog. April 1989.

Jones, Alan. “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” Cinefantastique. May 1989.

Beautiful Girls

There is something about turning 30 that makes one re-evaluate their life. It is that time when you are forced to grow up, find direction, settle down, and become an adult. Beautiful Girls (1996) concerns a group of men faced with this dilemma. They have been living in the past and recent events have forced them to confront it head on. This is also the late director, Ted Demme's best film in an all-too brief career. As he said in an interview at the time of the film's release, "I don't think there are too many movies about turning 30, or just about to turn 30. Those issues are whether to get married or not, whether to have kids or not, am I happy in my job, do I need to find another job, am I unsettled with myself. You're not a teen anymore, and you don't want to admit you're an adult either."

Willie (Timothy Hutton) returns to his small, Northeastern hometown for his ten-year high school reunion, hook up with buddies, and get his life in order. His mom has recently died (leaving his younger brother and father in a deep funk) and all of his friends are having relationship problems. Willie strikes up a friendship with a young girl named Marty (Natalie Portman) who has moved in next door. She is a character out of J.D. Salinger short story – wise beyond her years. Marty sets the tone for the rest of the women in the story. They are all intelligent and end up suffering with men who don't appreciate what they have right in front of them.

Screenwriter Scott Rosenberg was living in Boston, waiting to see if Disney would use his script for Con Air (1997). "It was the worst winter ever in this small hometown. Snow plows were coming by, and I was just tired of writing these movies with people getting shot and killed. So I said, 'There is more action going on in my hometown with my friends dealing with the fact that they can't deal with turning 30 or with commitment' – all that became Beautiful Girls." The resulting screenplay turned out to be quite autobiographical, with Willie being Rosenberg's surrogate.

The friendship between Willie and Marty pushes the boundaries of what is comfortable in a comfort movie but it never goes beyond it. Rosenberg's script is smart enough to be self-aware of this and even addresses it in a scene between Willie and Mo (Noah Emmerich). Fortunately, the movie narrowly avoids letting things get too uncomfortable and therefore taking us out of the captivating spell established by the movie. It also avoids clichés like the beautiful Andrea (Uma Thurman) having sex with one of the guys. Instead, she rebuffs them all because she is loyal to her boyfriend who, makes her martinis listens to Van Morrison and reads the newspaper with her on Sunday mornings – simple pleasures. She is not a perfect ideal, just on another level than these guys.

Rosenberg's screenplay is also able to juggle the various subplots without resorting to cliché resolutions. Tommy is cheating on his girlfriend (Mira Sorvino) with his high school sweetheart (Lauren Holly). When he gets beat up by her husband (Sam Robards) and his buddies you anticipate Willie, Paul (Michael Rapaport) and Mo to mobilize and kick some ass but at the last second they stop because the man's child will see her father get beaten up. This stops Mo who also has kids.

In addition to the clever plotting, Rosenberg's script also features a lot of funny, memorable dialogue. Tommy chastises Paul for getting his on again-off again girlfriend, Jan (Martha Plimpton) a brown-colored diamond when he tells him, "Buddy, you been eating retard sandwiches." There is also great throwaway dialogue like Stinky (Pruitt Taylor Vince) with his proprietor lingo, "We got apps!" or the often-used word "crease" to convey frustration at something, like when Tommy asks, "What's got him creased?"

All of the guys in Beautiful Girls are essentially the same person. Willie is just finding his luck, Paul just lost his luck as the movie begins, Tommy loses it over the course of the movie, and Mo has already found and achieved it with his family. Demme does not waste an opportunity to subtly illustrate his point. In one scene, he frames all three guys together: Paul (lost luck) is driving with Willie (finding luck) and Mo (achieved luck) along for the ride. The women counterpoint their men in this cycle: Tracy (Annabeth Gish) for Willie, Jan for Paul, Sharon (Mira Sorvino) for Tommy, and Sarah (Anne Bobby) for Mo.

The women in the movie are smarter than the guys and make them (and us) feel like they are lucky that their behavior is even tolerated much less loved despite all of their failings. This is epitomized in Gina (Rosie O'Donnell)'s famous monologue where she chastises Tommy and Willie for obsessing over the women in Penthouse magazine. She tells them, "If you had an ounce of self-esteem, of self-worth, of self-confidence, you would realize that as trite as it may sound, beauty is truly skin-deep." Gina speaks for the women in the movie when she reminds the men to forget the airbrushed ideal of women that we see in magazines and movies. They do not exist or are unattainable to any normal guy.

To counter her argument, later on in the movie, Paul delivers a monologue defending men's idealization for the impossibly perfect image of women. "She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man – promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow." It is a rare, articulate moment for Paul, suggesting that he may be more than some lunkhead who drives a snowplow. He may actually be a romantic. It is nice to see a film that is obviously told from a man's point of view trying to show both sides of the argument.

The women in the movie are not treated like excess baggage. They all have a soul and a brain which is rare for a film written and directed by men. There is a tendency to make them perfect or marginalized with their problems defining them. This is not the case with Beautiful Girls. This is reversed and it is the problems that define the men.


Ted Demme assembled a fantastic cast of independent character actors for his movie: Michael Rapaport, Max Perlich, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Mira Sorvino to name only a few. They all work so well together and their friendships are believable because of the preparation the director made them do. He had the entire cast come to Minneapolis and live together for two to three weeks so that they could bond. One only has to watch a scene like Andrea's first appearance in Stinky's bar as Willie and his friends try desperately to impress her that the two week bonding session paid off. There is an ease and casual nature between everyone that is authentic.

The setting is a character unto itself. Demme has set his movie in a charming east coast hamlet that is filled with little diners and bars that look so inviting that you want to go there, you want to be there. It all looks so comforting, so inviting and this is so hard to achieve properly in any movie. He commented in an interview that he "wanted to make it look like it's Anytown USA, primarily East Coast. And I also wanted it to feel like a real working class town." To this end, Demme drew inspiration from Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978). "The first third of the film is really an amazing buddy movie with those five actors. You could tell they were best friends, but they all had stuff amongst them that was personal to each one of them." Demme wanted to make Beautiful Girls more than just a buddy movie. When he read Rosenberg's screenplay he told him, "'You know, we really need to take this to another level.' If I was ever going to make a buddy movie, which I never thought I would, I wanted to make sure it had some real depth to it."

Beautiful Girls received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, "What's nicest about the film is the way it treasures the good feelings people can have for one another. They emerge most tenderly in the friendship between Willie and the 13-year-old girl." In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "But Beautiful Girls doesn't strain to accentuate the positive all that often. Thanks to those actors and to Scott Rosenberg's easygoing, colorful dialogue, it stays nicely inviting most of the time." In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "Portman, who made such a precocious splash in The Professional, reprises her fledgling sassiness in cuter form. As a self-described ‘old soul’ who connects spiritually with Hutton (they're both existential searchers), she's the movie's most poignant and witty presence."

The Los Angeles Times' Jack Mathews wrote, "Beautiful Girls follows the boys as they work their way through these crises, and it's about as much fun as a neighborhood bar on a Tuesday night. Its crisis: not much happening." Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C+" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "There is absolutely nothing going on in Beautiful Girls that you haven’t seen in Diner, Singles, or any other artistic endeavor in which untethered young men and women, bound by geography and fortified by beer, shamble their way toward overdue maturity."

 
The film does not wrap everything up nice and neatly. Paul and Jan's subplot is not resolved in the sense that we don't know if they settle their differences and get back together. Tommy and Sharon will probably get back together but it is not spelled out. Instead, as the closing credits appear we are left to imagine what happens to the characters. It is Paul's parting comments to Willie as he is about to go back to New York City, "Come and see us any time, Will. We'll be right here where you left us. Nothing changes in the Ridge but the seasons." This is also a message to the viewer as well. Come back and see Beautiful Girls again. The film's world and its characters are comforting and making you want to revisit them again and again.

SOURCES

Alexander, Peter. "Scott Rosenberg: Off to a Beautiful Start." The Best Video Guide.

Griffin, Dominic. "An Interview with Ted Demme, Director of Beautiful Girls." Film Threat. 1996.