I must admit from the outset that I’m always intrigued by a movie that inspires outrage, and I have a rebellious tendency to be more willing to embrace these films due to their very ostracization, whether from the hoi polloi or the highbrow, so maybe that’s my reverse bias. When Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny finally found U.S. theatrical release, my immediate response post-viewing was one of stricken incredulity. As the simple, bold, black-and-white credits rolled, I couldn’t get over the fact that this was the film (albeit a bit tweaked) that stirred such seething hatred at Cannes. It was never going to be a crowd-pleaser, not even on the art-house circuit for which it was intended, but its derisive reception far outweighed its alleged offences. The disparity between my press-inundated preconceptions, which suggested something far cruder, downright brazen in fact, and my actual viewing experience so clashed I could barely pick the pieces back up to put them together again. I can only conjecture that such a tender, broken-hearted offering was so abused because of a strong distaste for the man behind it. I can’t imagine an outpouring this venomous aimed at any director other than Gallo—except, perhaps Lars von Trier.

Like his debut, Buffalo ’66, this latest is haunting and filled to the brim with mood and accompanying music (composed, of course, by Gallo). But so many jumped in on the booing bandwagon that they missed out on its delicate pleasures and what amounts to no less than a wholesale revamping of the road movie genre. No matter which pair of easy riders, be it Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey and Mallory, or Thelma and Louise, most dramatic incarnations (as differentiated from the comedic variety) employ hyperbolic characters and situations to sketch out a conceptualization of America. The looseness afforded by the journey structure, coupled with the explicit iconicity of the car as freedom-enabler, allows the genre a specific elasticity, one exceptionally well-suited to investigations into any number of larger social concerns regarding the state of the nation. But despite being devoid of most conventional indicators, The Brown Bunny is more tuned in to the strange and beautiful rhythms of road-tripping than perhaps any other of the genre I’ve seen. The slowly changing views through a bug-splayed windshield, rearview mirror glances, scenery both magnificent (natural beauty) and mundane (ugly highways and strip malls), movements motivated by the necessities of gas/food/lodging, and the metronomic sound of windshield wipers in the rain, coalesce to produce a poetic ode to the open road, its bare-bones rendering emulating the character’s despondency. Beyond this dreamy vagueness and its ensuing mystifications, I was carried by the lulling quality Gallo creates, which oddly approximates the trance-like feeling so common to cross-country travels. The movie, like its main character, Bud (played, of course, by Gallo), is soft-spoken and subtle, intensely interior. If any character were to raise his or her voice, it would shatter the atmosphere of this particular world, so much does it play like a whisper (to the point that sometimes the actors mumblings are inaudible, and feel deliberately so, the exchange belonging exclusively to the characters for only a moment).

Though nothing much seems to happen, the initial randomness of Bud’s wandering builds, until soon we’re pulled along by the mystery of his journey. It’s remarkable how much we’re able to glean of this character through such little divulgence (until the end when it comes tumbling out in a sensationalized moment of catharsis). The main recurrences are brief interludes with passing females, full of peculiar depths of feeling. In his apparent melancholy (he spontaneously breaks into fits of tears), Bud is possessed of an intuitive sensitivity which allows him to temporarily connect with these women, in easy, uncreepy ways. There is a real intimacy in Gallo’s cinematic forging of these passages, many of which take place in extreme close-up, the proximity to subject so extreme he arrives at ponderous abstraction. Instead of being propelled forward with action, we’re tugged along by curiosity of what these odd encounters signify, and their connection to his much referred-to girlfriend, Daisy (Chlöe Sevigny), who we glimpse through brief and softly backlit flashbacks.

Though it’s a part of what got him into so much trouble, Gallo’s oft-noted narcissism is put to good effect here. As a man damaged by some irreparable grief, his utter focus on himself seems perfectly in place and cinematically mirrors the insulation of an individual in the throes of secret sorrow. Mesmerizing in its muted suspense, The Brown Bunny comes to be about discovering what drives him. Maybe the movie’s outcast status has to do with the fact that many would prefer to frame it as simply one man’s egocentrism rather than recognize it as indicative of a larger cultural trend towards an endangering self-centeredness. (Interestingly, Alexander Payne’s second road outing, the similarly soul-searching Sideways, which was also released this past year, has been embraced where The Brown Bunny has been reviled; it’d be fascinating to more closely compare the two, analyzing their convergences/divergences, to delve more deeply into how one became America’s sweetheart and the other its whipping boy.)

And of course, one can’t discuss The Brown Bunny without some mention of the controversial fellatio scene. While the momentum of the movie has permitted us to draw potential through-lines, we never quite flesh it out (literally) until these last moments. This most ireful of sex scenes unravels painstakingly, and although it’s the most explicit blow job I’ve seen in a non-porn movie, it’s far from merely titillating, and, at times, agonizing to watch, so embedded is it with a wide range of messy, complex emotions. There’s a sick, wrenching guilt and despair built into it, a relentlessly severe conclusion for a film which has moved along so mellowly. It’s disconcerting that realistic descriptions of possibly the most leveling of common denominators, human sexuality, still have no place in art cinema. Avid moviegoers should be singing Gallo’s praises from the rooftops for daring to thrash out the matter in all its imperfect, dark thorniness. I left the theater feeling raw, like an open wound, and I took this to be a sign that Gallo accomplished what he set out to do.

More on The Brown Bunny