Buffalo '66 (1998)

Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 arrives in 1998 with the confidence of a man who has never once considered whether anyone in the room might be uncomfortable. Billy Brown exits prison, abducts a teenage tap dancer named Layla, installs her in his parents' dim Buffalo living room as his wife, and then spends the remainder of the runtime being rude to her. The film is a character study of a specific kind of grievance, and it has no interest in correcting that grievance through any contemporary social framework. The camera loves Christina Ricci, the screenplay does not respect her, and nobody involved appears to have noticed the difference.

Our classification apparatus finds this vintage barren. The cast is white and assembled without any apparent color-consciousness. No queer subtext surfaces, no racial commentary, no environmental anxiety, no body-positive gesture. The premise, a man kidnapping a woman who then falls for him, sits far from any feminist reading, and the director's own stated politics, a self-reliance sermon aimed squarely at socialists, place the film on the opposite bank from any eat-the-rich sentiment. There is no lecture here. There is instead a man in a bowling alley, and King Crimson, and a mother who cares more about a football game than her son.

This is not a film that preaches. It is a film that sulks, beautifully, in saturated reversal stock, and asks us to find its sulking profound. The result is a curio: formally adventurous, emotionally stingy, and entirely free of the markers we have been dispatched to tally. We record the score, we note the absence, and we move on to the next screening. The Buffalo Bills still have not won a championship. Neither, in the end, has Billy Brown.