In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
What impressed me most on this rewatch of Drugstore Cowboy is how stylistically assured it is. It’s only the second film for director Gus Van Sant, and the shoot was much more complex than that of his debut film Mala Noche, and yet you always feel that Van Sant knew exactly how he wanted the film to look and feel and produced exactly that result. The look he achieves is not technical perfection but a kind of heightened naturalism, with a strong use of colors and meaningful framing choices coupled with shadows on faces and the occasional continuity error. As Director of Photography Robert Yeoman says in one of the interviews included on this disc, Drugstore Cowboy feels more real because it isn’t Hollywood perfect.
Drugstore Cowboy begins near the end, so most of the story is told in flashback. It’s 1971 and Bob (Matt Dillon) heads a crew of drug addicts: his wife Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his friend Rick (James LeGros) and Rick’s young girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham). They’re a pack of parasites who live by stealing, primarily from hospitals and drug stores, to get the drugs they use and sell, yet in this telling they’re a fairly likeable bunch. That’s partly because they mostly use cleverness rather than violence to get what they want, and also because they see themselves as trickster characters triumphing over “the man” by which they mostly mean the cops and secondarily the “straights” who work at the pharmacies they keep robbing.
If you have the least bit of teenage rebelliousness left in your soul it’s hard to not be on their side, at least at the start of the film when everyone seems to be having a good time. That’s in spite of the fact that they contribute absolutely nothing positive to this world and make messes that other people have to pay for and clean up. They are, as Bob’s mother points out, basically acting like children who refuse to grow up (Bob, Dianne, and Rick appear to be in their mid-20s, while Nadine is a teenager), but they seem to be having so much fun and living in such enviable freedom that it’s hard to begrudge them anything.
If you’ve seen Drugstore Cowboy, there’s one thing you’re sure to remember: never put your hat on the bed. Apparently that’s a cowboy custom involving the transmission of lice, but for Bob it’s a gospel truth that breaking that particular rule is tantamount to invoking the evil eye on yourself—and in the case of this film, it seems he was right. When one of the gang overdoses, Bob reconsiders his life choices and enters a methadone program where he encounters none other than William S. Burroughs, who plays an elderly priest with a taste for illegal drugs. Honestly, it’s worth seeing this film just for the Burroughs’ scenes, which are remarkably lifelike perhaps because he was personally familiar with the drug-addicted life.
The screenplay by Van Sant and Daniel Yost is based on the autobiographical novel Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogle, a career criminal whose victims probably found him less amusing than his alter ego Bob is portrayed in this film. Drugstore Cowboy was shot entirely in Portland (the story takes place mostly in unspecified locations throughout the Pacific Northwest) and some great location scouting plus Yeoman’s cinematography find interest in even the distinctly non-glamorous parts of town. The soundtrack by Elliot Goldenthal was mostly created by synthesizer but also incorporates some popular songs like “For All We Know” by Abbey Lincoln and “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” by Jackie DeShannon. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1251
Technical details: length; color or B&W; screen ratio; language.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray
Extras: audio commentary with director Van Sant and actor Matt Dillon; making-of featurette; interviews with actor Kelly Lynch and cinematographer Robert Yeoman
Fun Fact: The principal roles of Bob and Dianne were offered to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, which would have made an interesting although probably very different film.
Parting Thought: The names of the two principal female characters are anagrams of each other (in the film; not in the source novel). Is this telling us something about how Dillon’s character views them? He is kind of a jerk to both, after all.
