Midnight Cowboy (1969): Eitan’s Take

We’re getting to the point where it’s going to be very difficult to separate my own preexisting opinions and emotions about these films from the critical/cultural viewpoint I’m supposed to be lending in this project. Midnight Cowboy has been one of my favorite films since I was a teenager. In this small, strange package, I always felt there was an epic and intimate story about masculinity, sex, sadness, urban alienation, and surrogate families; my heart ached for it when I was younger, but seeing it tonight, my appreciation for this absolutely brilliant film only grew.

It doesn’t even need to be said that Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman turn in elegant, heartbreaking performances. Through the bleak storyline and dirty cityscape, their Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo stand out as two of the most indelible, flawless portraits of wounded masculinity ever committed to celluloid. Director John Schlesinger, who never directed a better or more vital film, gives these two loners room to breathe. Their interactions — always lying somewhere between painful and funny — are written and filmed with grace and trust.

Roger Ebert has said that this is a good movie with a masterpiece inside, trying to break free. I’ve always viewed it the other way around; despite all its potential flaws (self-conscious 60’s cinematography, gimmicky editing) it amounts to way more than the sum of its parts. What could have been a trite story about loneliness in the red light district is instead an atmospheric, heart-crushing study of the late-60’s collision between idealism and the harsh light of depressing cultural truths. But we are rarely tempted to see Joe and Ratso as vessels of a cultural message (the way we see Virgil Tibbs and Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night). Instead, they are the quintessential drifters, desperately shuffling through a world too grim and fast-paced for their tastes. In that sense, the movie is completely timeless — they will always resemble the desolate fringes of any culture, anywhere, in any decade. It should be said, also, that the film deals with Joe Buck’s queerness in a sophisticated and disarming way. I give the film a lot of credit for that.

This is one of the most important, inescapably haunting and brilliant films ever made, and I fully appreciate its broad influence on popular culture. But it is also a deeply personal film for me, and one I have definitely grown older with. 10/10.