“Salvation”: The movie Roger Ebert changed his mind on hating
Rewatching a movie – or watching an alternate version for the first time – doesn’t always completely alter one’s initial opinion, but it did in one very notable case for Roger Ebert. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of his second sitting didn’t mean a thing to the film’s director, who continued to lambast the legendary critic.
No stranger to courting controversy, Vincent Gallo’s reputation gained a bigger head of steam than ever before when The Brown Bunny premiered at the 2003 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Like many people present at the initial screening, Ebert was somewhere between bemused and appalled by what he’d just witnessed.
Describing it as “a film so shockingly bad that it created a scandal here on the Riviera not because of sex, violence or politics, but simply because of its awfulness,” Ebert went so far as to brand it “the worst film in the history of the festival.” He wasn’t alone in thinking The Brown Bunny was a self-indulgent vanity project, but due to his status in the world of film criticism, Gallo took it to heart.
By ‘took it to heart’, that obviously means the filmmaker placed a hex on Ebert’s colon, but unlikely redemption was lurking just around the corner. Several months later, The Brown Bunny screened again at the Toronto International Film Festival, albeit in a much shorter form after the 119-minute Cannes cut had been whittled down to a breezy 93 minutes.
With so much footage having been excised, Ebert was a lot more enthusiastic the second time around, celebrating the way a judicious edit had absolved The Brown Bunny of its many perceived sins. “The film’s form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly effective,” he mused. “It is sad that editing is the soul of the cinema. In the case of The Brown Bunny, it is its salvation.”
Was that the end of the bad blood between the two? Nope, not even close. Five years after Ebert’s death in 2013, Gallo penned an essay for Another Man, where he laid the entirety of the blame for the backlash that greeted his feature squarely at the door of The Brown Bunny‘s most vocal opponent.
“It is outrageous that a single critic disrupted a press screening for a film chosen in main competition at such a high profile festival and even more outrageous that Ebert was ever allowed into another screening at Cannes,” Gallo raged. “His ranting, moaning and eventual loud singing happened within the first 20 minutes, completely disrupting and manipulating the press screening of my film.”
After the critic’s mind had been changed, Gallo alleged that, “Roger Ebert made up his story and his premise because after calling my film literally the worst film ever made, he eventually realised it was not in his best interest to be stuck with that mantra.” He may gave The Brown Bunny a pass upon seeing again, but the movie’s writer, director, producer, star, editor, and cinematographer wasn’t buying it for a second.
