Directed by James Bridges
At the Sack Cheri
WHY DO THE CREDITS always come when the hero is driving down a highway? What is it about highways and Hollywood?
CLOSE-UP: Travolta's bearded face, impassively surveying his childhood home for what could be the last time. Then we
PAN OUT: To reveal the countryside once again, rows and rows of corn and other delectable green things that, presumably, have already been sprayed for bugs.
MEDIUM SHOT: The road, a thin white (should we? yes) ribbon sprinting toward the horizon.
LONG SHOT: Urban Cowboy.
Travolta moved with strobe-lit energy in Saturday Night Fever, woofing his dialogue in a clipped, arrogant, street dialect that matched the simplicity and pant-leg vision of his character. But he brings none of that same energy to director James Bridges' Texas hoedown, which attempts to show where them high-paid redneck rig-works head when the lights go down on the Lone Star prairie. Without a central character who can do anything more than look dumb--convincingly--Bridges has nowhere to take his film.
At first, he seems fascinated by the Southern notion of kin, families that bind when the shit starts flying. But then he turns to Southern sex, and then Southern drinking, and finally to Southern marriage. The men in this seedy world dominate the women and think nothing of taking a fist to the source of their romantic troubles. They are full of guts and fighting nerve, the leathery types who jumped at the chance to wade through the rice paddies near Da Nang. Watching them at leisure makes them no more appealing.
All of them, and their women, are obsessed with being cowboys. But Houston is a city of crude, not dudes, and so these men dress up in pointy boots, fat belts and straw stetsons to swig beer and suffer the whine of C&W at Gilley's, the biggest nightclub in the world. At Gilley's Travolta manages to fall in and out and in love with a cute kid named Debra Winger. For some reason, their parents don't attend their wedding, which takes place, naturally, at Gilley's. This all purpose saloon reeks of Coors and looks like a Shriners' club with the lights turned low. It leaves us pining for more highways and more credits.