Buffalo 66 is the place and year of Billy Brown`s birth. We meet Billy, played by co-writer and director Vincent Gallo just as he`s emerging from gaol after a five year stint for a crime he didn`t commit and unlike most films with this particular opening, Billy`s most urgent needs are a toilet - it`s cold in Buffalo - and a visit to his parents. He`s managed to maintain a fiction with them that he`s been away on business in Washington and that he`s married to Wendy. Mom insists he brings Wendy along to a family dinner.
Desperate to please he kidnaps Layla - Christina Ricci - from her tap-dancing class. She`s a baby doll in powder blue who`s just as alienated from the world as Billy is.What follows is the family dinner from hell - Mom, played by Anjelica Huston, can barely drag her interest away from the football on television to focus on her son and Dad - Ben Gazzara - is an unsettling misanthropist. It`s no wonder Billy emerges from the family home determined to revenge himself on the man he feels responsible for his fate - a footballer who failed to take a kick in a game Billy had bet big on. Buffalo 66 defies categorising, it`s really a fable about love, the need for it, the misplaced search for it and the acceptance of it when it finally appears.
Vincent Gallo joins the stream of actors who`ve taken on the role of writer/director, he just happens to have done it in a truly original and talented way. There`s no doubting his ability, Buffalo 66 is an extraordinary debut. Gallo was obviously working through very familiar territory in this film, both geographically and emotionally. Buffalo is his home town, in fact the family home in the film was the last place he lived with his parents there. And it`s Gallo`s father`s voice singing Fools Rush In that Gazzara mimes to. Performances are outstanding, particularly those of Gallo and Ricci. It`s so refreshing and invigorating to see a film like this.
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