Even thoughtless jackasses secretly long to be loved. Take me, for instance. Or there is also the case of Billy Brown. Billy has just been released from prison on a cold, winter day and, after serving five years for a crime he didn’t commit, finds that there’s nobody waiting outside the gates to pick him up. He tries to shrug himself deeper into his jacket as he takes a seat at a nearby bus stop and promptly falls asleep. When he comes to, Billy needs to pee. He shuffles back to the prison gates to ask if he can use the facilities where he’s flatly turned down just as the last bus of the day pulls up. Billy then has to take a long, lonesome ride back to Buffalo with a painfully full bladder and the dreadful certainty of only one thing; that his day is going to get worse.
So opens tormented artist Vincent Gallo’s 1997 masterpiece, Buffalo ’66, the story of a childish, small-time hood/one-man losing streak whose incredible string of bad luck and miserable upbringing have combined to create one of the most thoroughly pathetic and loathsome characters to hit the big screen in long, long time. That is, at first glance. Blatantly rude, woefully antisocial and utterly insecure, Billy (Gallo) finds himself back home in Buffalo broke and alone, struggling to compose himself before the inevitable task of visiting his parents whom he has tried to convince, without success, that he’s been working as a covert agent over his five year prison term. In an effort to appear somewhat legitimate, Billy “abducts” Layla, (Christina Ricci) a mildly curious dance student who happens to be passing by when Billy curtly asks her for a quarter so that he may use a payphone. Billy then forcibly enlists Layla to accompany him on his visit, instructing her to act as his fiancée during what promises to be a grueling and uncomfortable visit. Ben Gazara and Anjelica Houston are brilliant as Billy’s combative parents whose hard-boiled disdain for their estranged son is every bit as apparent and powerful as his mother’s over-the-top passion for Buffalo’s embattled professional football team. The sequences at the Brown house are dark and loveless, the mood completed with cheap décor and poor lighting, and both Gazara and Houston are at the top of their respective games, enhancing the believability of Billy’s erratic personality and helping to unveil the human equivalent of a good dog with bad handlers.
As the film continues, the layers of Billy’s life are methodically peeled away and there emerges a sad and sympathetic character whose uncanny predication for failure is only partly due to his own ineptitude. With each sequence, we find ourselves drawn into his pathos, beneath which lies a person who wants desperately to do well, but just can’t seem to find his footing and behaves badly (mostly) because he’s at such an emotional disadvantage in virtually every circumstance. But Billy does exhibit a flash of brilliance while on a brief side trip to one of his former haunts, a dingy bowling alley where he strips down to his sleeveless shirt and, with Layla looking on, throws perfect strike after perfect strike on his favorite lane; a warmer, more comfortable environment, foreign to his parent’s disgust and a place where Billy Brown is so well respected that they held his equipment for him despite his prolonged absence.
The composition and camera work is top-drawer, tending to gravitate toward and then hold itself on Ricci as she stares blankly into the camera, often from Billy’s POV, eliciting a subtle but solid emotional connection to both characters though the expressive light that reflects from her eyes. Ricci’s character is sweet enough and endearing enough to carry the load for the both of them and no matter how bratty and uncivil Billy becomes, she manages to buoy them both in the wake of his constant temper tantrums.
Gallo apparently went to great lengths to get the film made and it shows. Though he had to sacrifice the ability to purchase licensing from the NFL, enabling the use of the Buffalo Bills logo and film footage, he spared no expense on casting. What he had to spare in licensing, he makes up for with a terrific supporting cast and cameos by Jan-Michael Vincent as the clerk at the bowling alley, Mickey Rourke as a sorely displeased bookie and Roseanna Arquette as Billy’s viciously realistic former love interest. For everything that this film may have cost to produce, the result is beyond expectation and greatly solidifies Gallo’s reputation as a deeply determined artist, hopelessly dedicated to getting the most out of his craft regardless of how much skin may be stripped from his skeleton in the process.
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