Saturday Film Club #6: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Director: Gus Van Sant

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1993

Even at the time, Gus Van Sant's adaptation of Tom Robbins cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues seems to have upset people. Mainly, it seems, for the unforgivable sin of not being My Own Private Idaho.

There are always going to be problems with managing expectation when it comes to adapting a well loved book, especially one that was structured in such a way that adapting it for screen would be a challenge. But these problems were clearly added to by the success of the aforementioned Van Sant directed My Own Private Idaho three years earlier. 

Like MOPI, ECGTB features a member of the Phoenix clan. Rain in this case, not River, who had died the year prior to this films release. I'm not sure whether this raised expectations or not, but the many perceived failings of ECGTB cannot be laid at Rain Phoenix's feet as she is clearly playing a blinder as the teenage cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean, love interest to Uma Thurman's hitch hiking model Sissy Hankshaw.

Robbin's presumably didn't take too much issue with what Van Sant did to his book as he appears as the narrater, but there are clear differences between book and film, including the cutting of almost all of the plot involving Julian Gitche (played by a much underused Keanu Reeves). Like the book, the film is fairly all over the place, meandering here and there at a gentle, picturesque pace that reflects its origins in the counterculture of the 1970s. There are aspects of the story that wouldn't stand scrutiny today, including a self proclaimed mystic to the counter culture known only as The Chink (played by Pat Morita).

When taken in the context of the mid 1990s, the film was refreshing for providing rare portrayals of LGBT+ characters; from the bi curious rich bohemian set who attempt to seduce Sissy into a threesome following her disastrous first meeting with Julian, to John Hurt's majestic The Countess, not to mention the all-female community of the cowgirls. As with the depictions of the counterculture though, it's likely that viewers opinions of these characters, and their motives, will have changed since the book was written and the film was made. None the least because the depictions of trans and lesbian characters in the book and the film were constructed in entirely different cultural contexts than today. 

Aside from this wider point about representation, there are some genuinely good performances in the film: The aforementioned Rain Phoenix, who brings a cheeky exuberance to her portrayal of Jellybean, but also - perhaps surprisingly - Roseanne Arnold in an hilarious cameo as a the fortune teller Madame Zoe, who is faced with the unenviable task of telling the child Sissy's increasingly desperate mother that Everything Is Going To Be OK. When faced with the child's unfeasibly large thumbs, she breaks character and exclaims in horror "Jesus fucking Christ..."

 "A husband" mutters Sissy's mother, frantically pushing wads of money towards Madame Zoe, "Is she going to find a husband?"

Zoe, knowing which side her bread is buttered, draws herself up into a suitably mystic trance. "I see men in your life" she says brightly, looking over at the young girl "I also see... women: Lots and lots of women"

At which point Sissy's horrified mother drags the wide eyed child out of the fortune telling booth.

The grown up Sissy, aided by her large thumbs, takes to hitchhiking like the proverbial duck to water, living exclusively on the road and treating it as a way of life. She is talent spotted by The Countess, who hires her as a model to pedal his vaginal douches and other feminine hygiene products, recognising in the unworldly Sissy the perfect ingenue. 

As the role of The Chink suggests, there were elements of the 1970s counter culture that might feel more troubling today than they would have done at the time. As well as the personality cults of the 1970s, this character also shows the hippies fetishisation of other cultures, just as Sissy's interest in the Native American community hints at a possible, more well intentioned, fetishisation as well as America's deeply troubled and problematic relationship with that community. Similarly, it's fair to say that the past is a different country when it comes to attitudes to women, and that the counterculture's attitude towards women no longer seems as forward thinking as it was portrayed at the time. 

This is by no means a perfect film. It is deeply flawed in a number of ways, and at a number of levels, and yet it is a film that you can return to and find new things in. As well as Phoenix's performance, we also have some fantastically over the top scenery chewing scenes from Lorraine Bracco as Delores Del Ruby, the cowgirls peyote guzzling seer. Thurman's own performance is less good, but it's not as terrible as it's sometimes portrayed. Arguably, she can do comedy, but the role of Sissy Hankshaw falls somewhere between comedy and drama, and it's for this reason, and because of the overall strangeness of the films narrative in general, that she struggles a bit. 

Watch it for Phoenix, but expect Rain, not River.