"Buffalo '66" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Spare me - and, of course, you - from actors turning director and giving themselves the central role in self-indulgent, ego-driven exercises. This week it's the turn of Vincent Gallo, a mannered but clearly talented actor on the evidence of his performances in Arizona Dream, The Funeral and Palookaville. The title of Gallo's directing debut, Buffalo '66, refers to the place and year of the central character's birth. Gaunt, pallid low-life Billy Brown (nervily played by Gallo himself) is a recently released convict who kidnaps Layla (Christina Ricci) at her tap dancing class and takes her to visit his parents, claiming he is about to marry her. Guess what? He comes from a dysfunctional family.
Billy's parents are played as seedy and unloving, and far more interested in television sports coverage than in him. Blithely ignoring Layla's information that she is vegetarian, Billy's mother serves up tripe for dinner; meanwhile the television roars in the background, because no one ever listens to anyone in this household. The parents are played in fairly hilarious turns by Anjelica Huston in a huge track suit and Ben Gazzara laying on the lechery.
To Billy's surprise, Layla begins to provide elaborate embellishments for his excuse to explain the long time he spent away while in prison. To his even greater surprise, she becomes drawn to him and he finds it difficult to cope with someone genuinely, affectionately caring for him for the first time in his drab, sorry life. It is these tender elements, particularly in the poignant resolution, which are the most satisfactory aspects of Buffalo '66. Before we get there, there is a good deal of narcissistic self-indulgence, on Gallo's part, to endure, starting with the ridiculously protracted sequence in which he is frustrated at every attempt to find a place to urinate - and, later, an entirely superfluous scene in a bowling alley which would be yawn-inducing in a home movie.
The character of Billy himself is hard to tolerate most of the time. He is irrational, unhinged, delusional, bossy, arrogant, ignorant, selfish and patronising. Without a director to restrain him, Gallo lets loose in shamelessly mugging and a sometimes risible performance which teeters on the verge of a parody of Method acting. Clearly influenced by the work of John Cassavetes, but falling quite some way short of that actor-director's acuity and subtlety, Gallo's work as a director is more impressive. There are some interesting touches such as the picture-within-picture flashbacks he introduces in the very centre of the screen and then allows to fill the screen. And he elicits a most appealing performance from Christina Ricci, who has deposed Parker Posey as the queen of the US indies. The cast also includes cameos from Rosanna Arquette, Jan-Michael Vincent, Kevin Corrigan and a bloated-looking Mickey Rourke.
Yet the project finally reeks of a vanity exercise for Gallo who, in addition to starring and directing, is all over the closing credits - for devising the original story, co-writing the screenplay, composing the score and singing the closing titles song which, of course, he also wrote.
Over-praised in the US, Buffalo '66 arrives here trailing some rave reviews. However, its strongest endorsement has to be the one which claims it to be "the greatest movie ever made" - an endorsement which came on British breakfast television this week from none other than Vincent Gallo.
"Mercury Rising" (15) General release
So steeped in paranoia that it evokes some of the great 1970s post-Watergate thrillers (though never emulating them), Harold Becker's Mercury Rising is an efficient, well-paced but formulaic yarn in which all the cold-blooded killers are members of the US security services. Our first taste of their ruthlessness comes in the prologue wherein they mow down five members of a South Dakota militia, among them two teenage boys, during a bank robbery.
That prologue serves to establish the dedication and subsequent disillusionment of undercover agent Art Jeffries (played by Bruce Willis) who had infiltrated the militia group and had persuaded them to surrender just before the FBI burst in, guns blazing. After punching a superior in the aftermath, Jeffries is demoted to routine surveillance duties when he comes across the case of a nine-year-old autistic savant, Simon (Miko Hughes), who has attracted the attention of the National Security Agency when, for reasons too unlikely to outline here, he cracks the code for a $2 billion government security system that protects the identities operating under deep cover around the world. The agency responds by wiping out the boy's parents and seeking out the boy to kill him, too.
The cynical, washed-out Jeffries comes to the boy's rescue as the movie settles into a series of lively chase sequences - on foot, by car, on a train - before the de rigeur edge-of-a-skyscraper-roof cliff-hanger fight-out between Jeffries and the agency's oily executive smarmily played by Alec Baldwin.
