Roger Ebert Walking Out of the Theater Started an Infamous Feud

The Big Picture

• The Brown Bunny
  was a controversial film at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, receiving both negative and positive reviews, due to its lack of narrative, unsimulated sex scene, and the ego of its director.
• Vincent Gallo, the director, is known for his controversial actions and words, and has feuded with public figures, including Roger Ebert, who called
  The Brown Bunny
  the worst film in Cannes history.
• Despite the film’s slow and dull pace, Ebert’s opinion changed after watching a reworked version. He praised the themes and performances, and acknowledged its sincerity despite not being a cinematic masterpiece.

May 2003, the Cannes Film Festival. Depending on who you ask, The Brown Bunny was either jeered or achieved a 10-minute standing ovation. It certainly made an impact; whether that was because of the blatant egocentricity of its director/writer/star, the overwhelming lack of any real narrative, or the surprise unsimulated sex scene at the end, we may never know. But this movie by an arrogant director who managed to show his own porn at Cannes had people talking, and one of the many was Roger Ebert. He walked out of the movie and declared to awaiting cameras that it was “the worst movie in the history of Cannes”. As a famously silver-tongued critic, such declarations were not uncommon from Ebert, and it wasn’t very often that they merited a response from anybody. But what Ebert didn’t know as he wandered out of the screening and made this condemnation of The Brown Bunny was that he had invoked the fury of a filmmaker for whom tact and professional dignity were not exactly a virtue.

Vincent Gallo is… a character. This man has to be seen to be believed. Before The Brown Bunny, he made the well-received Buffalo ’66 starring Christina Ricci, and prior to that had spread himself thinly among a number of artistic endeavors, including modeling, music, performance art, and even Grand Prix motorcycle racing, according to his website. He is the type of free-spirited artist that many of us aspire to be, but with this carefree attitude comes a complete disregard for social etiquette. He has made more of a name for himself for his controversial words and actions than he has for being a great actor or director. As he puts it on his wonderfully surreal website, he is “one of the most misunderstood, misquoted, misrepresented talents in the past 25 years.” His very existence seems like some carefully crafted persona that is daring people to pick a fight. But despite the immense ego and corrosive attitude, there is actual talent in there. If he wasn’t so busy pissing people off, they may get a chance to look at him as an artist and admire his work.

Gallo has never had a problem with throwing very caustic insults toward public figures: he called Christina Ricci an “ungrateful c*nt” with a drinking problem, he told Howard Stern that Quentin Tarantino was stoned 24/7. But his most below-the-belt blows were reserved for the man who dared to call his movie “the worst film in the history of Cannes.” As Ebert wrote, “Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a ‘fat pig’ in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have ‘the physique of a slave-trader.’” The Brown Bunny’s reception on the film festival circuit, and its maker’s disdain for Ebert, saw a bunch of attention coming Gallo’s way in the immediate aftermath, and he told anybody who would listen how much he hated the critic.

Ebert found the whole thing rather amusing, retorting in his review, “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.” Despite the savagery with which Gallo approached this disagreement, the two hashed it out rather swiftly, and when Gallo appeared on Howard Stern’s show, Ebert called in, and the two laughed about their little back-and-forth, with the critic joking that Gallo’s aim was pretty bad, seeing as he promised him colon cancer and what he got was salivary cancer. In a way all good critics should, Ebert recognized the need to be able to take what he gave, and he felt no ill will towards Gallo, and in fact encouraged him to keep making movies.

What Happens in ‘The Brown Bunny’?

Bud Clay (Gallo) is driving to California… that’s basically it. He’s a strung out Charles Manson-looking guy, with deep sad eyes, unkempt hair and a hole in the right butt cheek of his only pair of jeans. He rides a motorbike, which he keeps in the back of his van and sometimes takes out, while we watch him in real time as he unlocks the door, sets up a ramp, gets in, wheels the bike down said ramp, puts the ramp away, closes the door again, etc. This is very much a pattern with The Brown Bunny. The action digs its heels in and drags great streaks through the gravel as it is pulled along, to the point that it causes mild to moderate irritation in the viewer. Shots will carry on for about five seconds too long, way after the action has ended, and Bud just stares at people blankly for about 20 seconds before responding to something they’ve said.

You could make a fairly informative pie chart to illustrate what you’re in for with The Brown Bunny. You’ve got 50% dashcam footage, 10% loading motorbikes in and out of various vehicles, 5% what would traditionally be considered “scenes,” 20% unfocused and weirdly framed close-ups of Bud, often with his chin or nose cut out of the shot. Throw in the odd gas station visit or makeout session with a woman with a flower name, and there you have it. It cannot be overstated just how goddamn boring the first 80 minutes of The Brown Bunny really are. What makes The Brown Bunny so dull is that it just seems completely aimless, and the way the shots are framed doesn’t help to sell any context or emotion. Actors are often shot close-up from behind, so you can’t see their faces as they react to each other, just a screen full of hair. When we should be seeing Bud’s face to help us distinguish why he has just made a particular choice, we are given a shot of the outside of his van. Between cinematography and editing (both credited to Gallo, naturally), the movie sells zero emotion, zero story and zero intrigue of any description.

‘The Brown Bunny’ Infamous Sex Scene Turns the Movie Around

But then, the craziest thing happens: the infamous blowjob scene arrives, and suddenly, a metric ton of emotional weight is unleashed on the audience. The only discernible thread of a narrative involves Bud’s former relationship with a woman named Daisy (Chloë Sevigny). When he finally — mercifully — finishes his journey to LA, he looks Daisy up, and she arrives at his hotel room, suspiciously getting in noiselessly and without a key. Bud is emotionally comatose as she reminisces about their lost love, and how she still loves him. They get intimate, and the energy of it all gets too much for Bud. He breaks down crying, recalling a night when he and Daisy were at a party, and he found her having sex with a group of other men. She was a heroin addict, and pregnant, but that night she overdosed. Lying beside Bud, Daisy reminds him that she died that night, choking on her own vomit. Suddenly, he is alone in this hotel room, in the fetal position on the bed. Daisy was never there, just a figment of a depressive hallucination.

This scene is wonderful. This is where the talent behind Gallo’s ego comes bursting forth, and he shows that he does, in fact, feel human emotions and has the capacity to communicate those emotions on the screen. Here Gallo proves his fearlessness in displaying raw emotion: his cries are anguished, uncaring that his voice has gone up an octave or is cracking under the emotional weight of his monologue. He is reduced to a blubbering mess, and it’s this intensity that he has dropped tiny hints at throughout the runtime that you wish you could have seen more of. I suppose he’s going for a sudden and violent eruption of character that will give the movie a sense of climax.

Between the unsimulated fellatio and the sudden narrative intensity, it’s no wonder that the finale wakes the audience up again. Surprisingly, given the controversy the scene attracted in its day, the real sex element of it is quite subdued, and actually offers a window into the psyche of this tortured lead character. This is the only scenario in which Bud allows his buried feelings to rise to the surface, and the emotional stimulation is overwhelming for him, finally causing his breakdown. For once, a movie with unsimulated sex manages to justify itself with its style, framing and narrative relevance. This is not porn — it’s a movie with real sex, and if ever a film made this distinction clear, it is The Brown Bunny.

As Gallo told Stern, “I used icons of pornography and I attached them to consequence, guilt, grief.” Chloë Sevigny would characterize the movie as “an art film. It should be playing in museums. It’s like an Andy Warhol movie.” This is probably the most on-point assessment of The Brown Bunny out there. It’s not a movie you watch for entertainment, and it’s not a movie you make for money or Hollywood prestige. It is an artistic experiment that presents its audience with a scenario that they can take or leave. It’s not the movie’s job to make you think or feel, it’s your job as a viewer to pick it apart and decide what it’s trying to say. Of course, this is not what the average moviegoer has in mind when they shell out for a ticket, so it is left to the more critically-minded arthouse enthusiast to appreciate The Brown Bunny for what it is.

Roger Ebert Enjoyed Vincent Gallo’s Edited Cut of ‘The Brown Bunny’

With the achingly slow and dull pace that the majority of the movie delivers, it’s no surprise that Ebert wasn’t impressed — particularly considering the version he saw at Cannes was 26 minutes longer, and by all accounts, 26 minutes duller. Gallo claims that his subsequent edits were not a result of Ebert’s, or anybody else’s criticism. He told Howard Stern that the cut shown at Cannes was a working print, and he was continuing to whittle it down before and after the festival. In September 2004, Ebert reviewed the now-complete 93-minute version of the movie and found his opinion quite changed. “It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of The Brown Bunny, it is its salvation,” he wrote. He pointed out the core themes of emotional need and loneliness, and the strength of its performances, and while it would never be considered the Citizen Kane of indie road movies, it finally showed some of what it was aiming for: sincerity.

So Ebert went back to writing and battling the cancer Gallo had so generously gifted him, and Gallo went back to being an aloof creator with a sporadic artistic output. This brief time in which their professional paths crossed would forever stand out as one of the most amusing, perplexing and memorable chapters in their respective careers, and would help The Brown Bunny maintain a legacy of controversy, self-indulgence and mean-spirited jabs. It was not often that a movie Ebert declared hatred for got its redemption arc, and it is even more unusual given the self-assured nature of the man who made it and accepted that there was a better version of his movie buried somewhere in that footage. For those who are into art cinema and critical feuds enough to check the movie out, there could certainly be worse ways to spend 93 minutes… as long as you have an inexplicable passion for the insides of dirty windshields.

The Brown Bunny is available for purchase on Amazon in the U.S.

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