‘The Brown Bunny’: A “disastrous” movie that eventually won Roger Ebert over
The job of a film critic is to offer an honest appraisal of the latest releases they’ve wrapped their eyeballs around, and having dedicated his entire professional life to the art of criticism, Roger Ebert knew how to be venomous whenever he saw a movie that he loathed with every fibre of his being.
There weren’t many that he savaged to such an extent that the filmmakers responsible would call him out on it, but that doesn’t mean it never happened. Mel Brooks, a titan of modern comedy, laid into Ebert when he gave Dracula: Dead and Loving It a savage review, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was a bit shit.
His feud with Rob Schneider began on brutal terms before reaching a wholesome conclusion, with Adam Sandler’s favourite hanger-on taking umbrage with the fact that Deuce Bigelow was not a universally beloved masterpiece, but rather a stain on the good name of cinema that Ebert was entitled to call such as a Nobel Prize winner.
However, neither of them could hold a candle to what went down between Ebert and Vincent Gallo, with the director cursing his colon, hexing his prostate, and calling him a “fat pig” after the critic went to town on The Brown Bunny, which, following its premiere at Cannes in 2003, he called “the worst film in the history of the festival,” and he stuck to those guns.
He described the first showing as “one of the most disastrous screenings I had ever attended,” trashed it as “unendurably boring,” and “aggressively pointless.” Whether Cannes had anything to do with it or not, the filmmaker returned to the editing suite, excised almost 30 minutes of footage, and the strangest thing happened: Ebert awarded the director’s cut of The Brown Bunny three stars out of four.
“Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a fourth of the running time,” he explained. “And in the process, he transformed it. The film’s form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective. It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of The Brown Bunny, it is its salvation.”
By tightening up the movie, Ebert barely recognised it, or Gallo, for that matter. “He is not the same director of the same Brown Bunny I saw at Cannes,” he remarked. “And the film now plays so differently that I suggest the original Cannes cut be included as part of the eventual DVD, so that viewers can see for themselves how 26 minutes of aggressively pointless and empty footage can sink a potentially successful film.”
It wasn’t perfect by any means, since he noted that it remains “odd and off-putting when it wants to be,” but after maybe taking the Cannes criticism to heart more than he’d ever be willing to admit, Gallo returned with a completely different film, one that “evokes a tender sadness.”
“Make no mistake; the Cannes version was a bad film,” Ebert intoned. “But now Gallo’s editing has set free the good film inside.” That’s something nobody expected to hear when he destroyed The Brown Bunny the first time he’d seen it, but that’s the magic of cinema, with one of the worst things he’d ever seen reborn as a picture he genuinely enjoyed the second time around.
