Actor/Director/Writer Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66 is, on a superficial level, almost irritatingly 'indie' (i.e. that which seethes with artistic reaching and uses gritty film stock to prove it). Characters wear clothes best suited to an old Blind Melon video, dialogue is pungent and ironically repetitive, and gloomy weather endlessly hangs over everything, in what at first glance appears to be yet another entry into the 'loser chic' school of cinema.



But wait. . .



Instead of wearing its disaffected stance as a badge of credibility, Buffalo 66 uses it as a springboard to a far deeper, and very affecting, exploration of the psyche of human failure. Using Buffalo (and its poor, woeful Bills) as a backdrop and rather hilarious metaphor for missed opportunities and blown chances, Gallo picks at the protective, pseudo-celebratory scab that was Beck's 'Loser', and exposes the real pain of the loser.



Gallo is terrific as Billy, just released from a five-year prison stint after a 10,000 bet with a loanshark (played by that perennial loser Mickey Rourke, in fine scuzzy form) and a missed fieldgoal kick force him to take the fall for a crime to pay back his debt. Jimmy's first move is to kidnap a cherub named Layla (Christina Ricci, in an inspired performance), only to convince his parents, who've never known he was in jail, that he's married.



Angelica Huston and Ben Gazzara play Billy's unbalanced parents in a reunion scene which is at once uproariously funny and horrifyingly telling (they have exactly one childhood picture of Billy). Slowly, Buffalo 66 reveals itself to be a tragi-comic parade through an agonizing childhood and adolescence, one that still vividly and actively haunts Billy's present.



As a director, Gallo brilliantly employs his quirky visual playfulness to compliment the plot's unfolding, while never overstating his ideas (Oliver Stone, take heed). There is much that is funny, tragic, and startlingly beautiful in Buffalo 66, and it ranks as one of 1998's finest films.