Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

1983
Written and Directed by Gus Van Sant
Based on a novel by Tom Robbins
Starring Uma Thurman, John Hurt, Rain Phoenix, Lorraine Bracco, Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover, "Pat" Morita, Udo Kier and Roseanne Barr

There's a difference between bad movies: some are just bad, while some are so offensively terrible that they inspire a near physical revulsion in the viewer.  It's unfair to even place movies that are merely gross in the second category.  For example, just because you're grossed out by the eight minute rape scene in Irreversible, you can't categorize the movie alongside something like Cowgirls.  They aren't the same type of bad.  Bad is 16 Blocks, or the Assault on Precinct 13 remake.  Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is somewhere beyond those movies--or, to be more technically accurate, somewhere beneath them.  Similar to the common cliche that you can't really hate something if you've never had any liking for it, Cowgirls is one of those astonishing failures made almost completely out of objects that had worked, and would work again--yet when those objects came together in Cowgirls, they annihilated one each others respective goodness and laid bare a movie that, had films any power to damage the world they are viewed in, would have broken our planet in half.

It should be noted that, regardless of what the world may think, the offices of the Factual firmly hold the belief that all of Tom Robbins literary output belongs solely under the purview of a toilet bowl; less histrionically put, the man writes books of shit.  It's not only unlikely that a good version of a book of his could be made into a film, it's also true that any accurate representation of his works would result in a film that wouldn't be even remotely entertaining.  Considering that Gus Van Sant's version of the Cowgirls novel is oft-derided by Kool Aid slurping ex-hippies as not being faithful enough to Robbins new age horseshit, this viewer wishes that the Van Sant has just gone ahead and filmed the damn book in it's entirety.  The resulting film would have still been horrible, but at least all the blame could have rested on Robbins shoulders--as it is, the mess Mr. Portland brought to the screen is, in some aspect, partly his fault.  As a side-note, Rain Phoenix is, without any shade of doubt, completely his fault.  There's not a single director on earth that would have been foolhardy enough to give this young lady such a healthy part.  While we're all sure that she's a real sweetheart, she can barely form cogent sentences, much less act.  She's got the type of charisma that makes people fall asleep at documentaries--she's just that boring.  Watching her drop her pants and threaten a homosexual John Hurt with her "stinky, tuna fish-smelling, unwashed" genitalia doesn't help.  Honestly, Judi Dench and Glenn Close probably couldn't make that hideous scene work, but Ms. Phoenix is particularly unsuited for it.  We were all real upset about River too, Mr. Van Sant, but it doesn't mean i asked Joaquin if he wanted to clean my teeth.  I asked my dad, because he's a dentist.  Having a dead brother doesn't make anybody a great actor.

Rain may have have the excuse that she doesn't have a clue how to speak, but the rest of the cast doesn't.  All of these people, even the abominable Lorraine Bracco, have been good before.  (Well, Roseanne was only good on her sitcom, and Mr. Miyagi's career is made up of extended riffs on racial stereotypes, but still, both know how to work with a bad script.)  It's easy to single out certain performers for abuse--John Hurt has been a genius in some awful stuff, and his one-note performance here, in a role that screams for far more exploitation than he's willing to give, speaks to a lack of courage that is totally incongruent with the performer we know he can be.  His omnipresent narrator in Von Trier's Dogville is far more fascinating in one-minute sound bites than the irritating and neutered Countess he appears as in Cowgirls.  Uma Thurman learned how to make the bizarro work by the time her career took her to the Kill Bill films, and she's able to skate by here solely by using bland facial expressions, but the movie never attempts to explore what type of story can be told when it's protagonist is a numbed out cypher of a human being.  In all, only two of this films performers actually move into the realm of good, unsurprisingly enough, it's Udo Kier and Crispin Glover--two men who have the most pumped up charisma of any human beings on the planet.  (In all seriousness, isn't it about time to clone whatever is running through Udo Kier's veins?  The man made Johnny Pneumonic entertaining.  He's clearly a god.)

There's not much to say about the actual plot of the movie, which is why it hasn't been mentioned until now: because there isn't one.  There's a fight over the ownership of a ranch, settled by having a bunch of lesbian feminist cowgirls drop trough to unleash their "stinky pussies."  (Hey, if that offends you, don't blame me.  It offended me too, and I'm about as ambivalent to sexism as you can be before people start calling you a misogynist.)  Of course, then the cowgirls drug a bunch of whooping cranes with peyote, thereby cooling out "their bad vibes."  (Only in a Tom Robbins book could an endangered species be saved by this kind of pointless idiocy.)  Unexplored subplots abound, none of which are missed when abandoned.  If that isn't enough, Uma spends the majority of the film with massive fake thumbs, neither of which look very real--yet are still capable of being completely repulsive.

There's absolutely no good reason to watch this movie.  The only acceptable one that this viewer came up with is that it cemented forever the truism that Gus Van Sant's what-the-fuck remake of Psycho wasn't really that bad.  It's boring, sure.  But it's no Cowgirls Get The Blues.

Comments

I agree that the movie wasn't so great, however, to be so close-minded about Robbins' novels -now that's a pity! You're really missing out! He's so goofy & I love that!