Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

It’s hard to know where to start with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s an odd movie. This should be a good thing. I like strange movies a lot. But Even Cowgirls Get the Blues maybe isn’t strange enough. It’s a lot of things all at once and none of it adds up to a satisfactory whole.

The lead character in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is Sissy (Uma Thurman). Sissy is born with enormous thumbs. Said giant thumbs have a mild superpower that allows Sissy to be a world-class hitchhiker. The drawback is that her thumbs start to hurt on days when she doesn’t hitchhike. Because she’s played by Uma Thurman, Sissy is an occasional model. A rich acquaintance of hers named The Countess contacts Sissy to star in a commercial for their new female deodorizer line. Sissy accepts the job and travels to a ranch to film it. Here, she meets a group of wannabe cowgirls including Bonanza Jellybean. These cowgirls take a stand against The Countess’ focus on shaming female hygiene and natural odours. Sissy falls for Bonanza Jellybean and eventually joins their cause which is now focused on preservation of the whooping crane.

The best part of the film is the cast. There’s so many weird people I’d never expect to see in a film together, let alone a WLW film. The first half especially has a lot of pretty famous people almost all of whom disappear by the second half of the movie. John Hurt plays the gender ambiguous yet misogynist The Countess. Carol Kane plays a model! Crispin Glover shows up at one point? Keanu Reeves is in this??? (When he showed up, I actually said that out loud to my empty apartment.) William S. Burroughs does a cameo as himself?! For me, the one-two punch of Keanu Reeves showing up and Crispin Glover appearing a scene later only for both to disappear by the halfway mark was the real highlight of this odd cast.

Unusual cast aside, this isn’t a successful venture Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a film that constantly reminds me of better films. Primarily, the film feels like director Gus Van Sant trying to make a John Waters movie. There’s a similar level of a strange cast of notable characters, gender ambiguity and a level of filth. But Van Sant’s John Waters impression is pretty weak. He doesn’t nearly take it to John Waters-level of filth and certainly doesn’t celebrate this aspect nor its cast of absurd and often amoral characters the way a Waters movie would. Even Cowgirls is John Waters-lite and I don’t think that’s a thing that needs to exist. Either go all the way or don’t go at all.

The film also reminds me of the Mad Max franchise. Like Max, Sissy drifts into a community already poised on the verge of revolution. But while in Mad Max, this largely works, here it makes Sissy feel aimless, unattached and the plot feel random. Nothing seems to affect Sissy. She wanders around and ends up in a plot already in progress. Then, she leaves this plot for a while and gets her giant thumbs removed. Even her giant thumb-ectomy doesn’t affect her. So, she goes back to Bonanza Jellybean as they’re now in love, apparently. Sissy herself doesn’t care about whooping crane conservation. She’s here for love. But even Bonanza Jellybean’s death only seems like a mild tragedy. Sissy running the ranch at the end doesn’t feel like a happy or earned ending because all of the events in her life feel random and without emotional stakes.

Van Sant is a gay director and obviously, Even Cowgirls has queer sensibilities. But like I mentioned above, he doesn’t revel or celebrate this. There’s something distinctly unkind about his portrayal of pretty much every character in the film. There’s a tone of mockery in the film but I’m not sure what it’s mocking. Is it the beauty industry itself? Or is it the odd characters who include female radicals, queer people and gender non-conforming individuals? Van Sant seems to have little love for his characters, even the heroes of the piece. This is a shame because I’d enjoy a film about some strange, female radicals who smoke peyote and are into wildlife conservation if the film itself seemed to enjoy these characters.

I did not get what Gus Van Sant was going for with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And judging by critic and audience response, no one else did either. The film is too separate from reality to say anything about the real world but not surreal enough to work on that level. It has the look of a comedy but few clear jokes. The humour seems to be at the expense of unusual individuals including sexual minorities and women. It’s also pretty racist at times. For this movie to work, Gus Van Sant needed a tighter reign on the unusual society he’d created in the film and also to genuinely enjoy at least some of the oddballs he populated the movie with. In Even Cowgirls get the Blues, he did neither.

Overall rating: 4.5/10

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