Christina Ricci made her transition from kid to adult fare in stark fashion. A year after doing “That Darn Cat,” she starred in “The Opposite of Sex” and the even more idiosyncratic “Buffalo ’66” (1998). Vincent Gallo is the writer, director and star, with Ricci – whose face is made up whiter than her white shirt – as more of an object than a subject.
Gallo’s Billy Brown gets rich characterization, and Ricci’s Layla gets almost none; in fact, Billy asks her to use the alias Wendy Balsam. Yet both characters are fascinating – Billy because of every bizarre thing we learn about his horrible upbringing, Layla because she for some reason is OK with being kidnapped.
Buffaloed over
What’s especially impressive about this movie co-written by Alison Bagnall is that we actually believe it (within its own internal logic), something that can’t quite be said for Ricci’s other 1998 dark comedy, “The Opposite of Sex,” even though that film is closer to “normal.”
“Buffalo ’66” (1998)
Director: Vincent Gallo
Writers: Vincent Gallo, Alison Bagnall
Stars: Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara
Billy nabs Layla from a dance class, and then she is mostly happy to hang out with him for the rest of the day. Despite many opportunities to run off, she sticks with him; like the viewer, she sees he’s not a bad guy at heart.
Billy is a bizarre equation, but the equation squares up. In a series of stiffly funny kitchen-table scenes, we (and Layla) meet his dad (Ben Gazzara) who smoothly morphs from a horror show of a dismissive father into someone who smoothly tells his son he loves him; same goes for his sudden new “daughter-in-law” “Wendy.”
And Billy’s mom (Anjelica Houston) is obsessed with the Buffalo Bills. (“Bills” is never said in the film, but it plays fine anyway.) In fact, although “Buffalo ’66” is a series of connected, motionless-camera vignettes like 2004’s “Napoleon Dynamite,” the plot finds Billy intending to murder Scott Wood.
The kicker missed a key field goal against the Giants that would’ve given Buffalo its first world championship since January 1966. (IRL, it was Scott Norwood.) Through bad decisions and worse luck, Billy believes Wood has ruined his life.
Film has dark sensibility, big heart
“Buffalo ’66” is about the cruelty of the world, and bad parenting – but with a hopefulness that a warm nature can ultimately melt away cold nurture. We immediately sympathize with Billy, who is in a situation like that guy in “The Shawshank Redemption” who can’t live outside of prison. Billy is released, but he can’t find a bathroom, let alone a place to stay.
Perhaps it might’ve been better if we got a parallel backstory of Layla, but even without it, her behavior is fascinating. She has nowhere in particular to go. It’s an accidental Stockholm Syndrome situation. After the initial kidnapping because he needs a fake wife, Billy doesn’t manipulate Layla to stay; in fact, he wants her to leave.
One might argue Ricci’s character is an MPDG, except that she’s not manic or spacey. She’s just a pixie girl. Perhaps the white makeup is to make us think of a porcelain doll. That actually allows “Buffalo ’66” to dodge accusations of portraying a dangerously unrealistic ideal woman. Only someone fake would fall in love with Billy in one day.
No one in their right mind would take specific moments of “Buffalo ’66” seriously, but – like “Napoleon Dynamite” six years later – the overall film is quite moving. People in their right heart might very well latch on to this oddity.