Buffalo 66

In Buffalo 66, Christina Ricci continues to amaze.

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Vincent Gallo
A Lions Gate Films release

recommended

Christina Ricci isn't the only reason to see Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66. She is, however, a fabulously good one. Critics have been hard put to come up with intelligent adjectives for her performance as Layla, kidnapped by the just-released-from-prison emotional hard case Billy Brown (Gallo). They're calling her "pouty," an "innocent dumpling," an "insolent" as well as "enigmatic and compelling" presence. The girl has clearly hit buttons for a number of (male) reviewers, but what's going on here is more sweet and creepy, more perfect and seductive and beyond adjectives than even these clever, articulate guys would have it.

Not so long ago, Ricci was playing the adorably chilly Wednesday Addams and the adorably rational sidekick to Casper the Friendly Ghost. Then, last year, she made a quick on-screen transition in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, as the righteous, angry, curious, alarmingly intelligent and sexually daunting Daughter (surrounded by brothers in crisis, her own prep-schooled sibling and two neighbors competing for her affections). And now, in fast succession, she's appearing in independent films, as a spiritually and sexually aggressive, indignantly white-trashed young woman in Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex, and the breathtakingly wise eerie doll-woman in Gallo's movie.

To be sure, this is Gallo's movie, he of the haunted eyes and sunken cheeks, so befitting the gaunt losers he played in The Funeral and Palookaville, not to mention the too-chic-for-words Calvin Klein ads he made a while back. That he's made this semi-autobiographical film, to co-write, direct and star in it, suggests that he's colossally arrogant, talented (or both). That the film is, after all, pretty sharp, suggests that he's also able to play well with others, for all the imperious posturing he's been doing lately in the press.

Billy's a major victim-for-life, alienated and frustrated (he did time for a crime he didn't commit, as we learn in flashbacks), plagued by memories of his abusive parents, and allied only with a kind but dumbfuck best buddy named Goon (the terrific Kevin Corrigan), who never leaves his bedroom and only speaks with Billy by phone ("Don't start evil," he warns, feebly, sadly, hopefully). Running into Layla is the beginning of the most superb dream he might have imagined, but he can't know that. It's the lesson he learns over the course of the film, and by the time you've watched the dream unfold, all fits and starts and oddball freeze frames and eccentric camera angles, we end up feeling as lucky as he does.

Layla is at home in this acutely cinematic dream. Actually, she's a tap-dance student, with a vaguely Shirley-Templish body-shape. As she emerges from the bathroom after class, still dolled up in her flimsy babyblue dress, silver heels (with taps intact), pale blond hair and glitter eye shadow, Billy grabs her and drags her to the parking lot with his hand over her mouth. He forces her to drive him to his parents' home in Buffalo, NY (he can't drive a "shifter car" because he's "used to luxury cars that shift themselves"), and during the ride he berates her filthy windshield and frets about finding a toilet.

He finally pees roadside, after demanding that Layla wait for him with her hands on the steering wheel where he can see them. The fact that she does so suggests that she's at least a little intrigued by this painfully scrawny, agitated creature. And when he asks her for a "favor," she almost seems to agree because what he asks her is so totally preposterous.

This is what's so cool about Layla. She not only rolls with the punches (and the situations facing her become increasingly absurd), but she elaborates on them, turning them into choreography for a little dance of her own. In one scene she literally starts tap-dancing in a bowling alley while a spotlight catches her and the rest of the movie takes a time-out for her mini-spectacle. It's not that she's in another world, so much as she makes the one around her fit her needs and expectations. And she doesn't even have to work very hard at it, she's so adorable and vulnerable and charming that people seem inclined to want to fit, for her.

Billy asks Layla to play his wife, for his parents. But that's only the beginning. He tells her that she has to act like she adores him, like she can't live without him, like she's always loved him. Layla frowns slightly, absorbing the instructions. Billy says that if she screws up, he'll kill her right there and never talk to her again, but if she does a good job, she can be his best friend. He's so visibly disturbed, so knotted up about the prodigal visit, that it seems reasonable that she would agree, that she'd do her best to please his parents.

And it gets worse. The Browns are stuck in some long-gone moment, different for each of them. Mom (Anjelica Huston), who still resents Billy for being born during a crucial Bills game, can't keep her hand off the remote or her eyes off a circa-1960s videotaped football game, throughout the "newlyweds'" visit. Dad (Ben Gazzara) can't keep his hands off Layla ("Daddy loves you!"). While Mom tries to feed Billy chocolate (to which he's apparently always been allergic), and Billy grimaces and pulls at his skanky hair, Layla sits in a kind of serene trance, not vacant, but rising to the occasion. Suddenly, it seems almost courageous, if also insane, that she's narrating her romance with the "handsome" Billy, detailing their courtship while they worked together at the CIA.

The CIA. It strikes you at various points in the film—like this one—that Layla's quite brilliant in her abilities to survive, imagine and understand. The film does its best to keep up with her. Arty and arresting camerawork at the Browns' dinner table (where Mom serves tripe) complements the mounting tensions: shots from each character's point of view change the composition every few seconds, so that someone is left out of every shot. It's a bold and strange gimmick that makes you think about how you're watching these bold and strange performances, and perhaps more importantly, how the characters are watching each other.

It's clearly these performances that make this thin dream of a story go, past its obvious limits. The film makes this idea visible and a little meta, underlining through images both angsty and subtle, that performing is how people get on with and get to know each other, as well as how they maim and destroy each other. Layla probably wouldn't put it quite that way, but she's a character, fictional, decipherable, electric. It's Ricci who makes the connections. Lucky us.