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In Gus Van Sant's feature debut he gives his material fresh shape in a unique invigorating, syncopated style. It keeps coming at you in surprising, dazzling and jazzy ways.
The deadpan comic buzz you get from Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy" is practically narcotic. The movie heightens your senses and mildly anesthetizes them at the same time, like a potent mixture of stimulants and depressants. One of the most invigoratingly original American comedies since Jim Jarmusch's 'Stranger Than Paradise', "Drugstore Cowboy" follows druggy, irregular rhythms all its own. Whether in a heavy-lidded daze or wired with giddy, post-high paranoia, "Drugstore Cowboy" displays an uncanny alertness to detail and texture -- yellow-white bus headlights that barely penetrate the slate-gray, late-afternoon gloom on a rain-drenched northwestern road; the surreal surge of blood into a hypodermic syringe as it enters a vein in intensified close-up. But the film's vibrant aliveness to such minute sensations is submerged beneath a cold, clammy complexion: the blue-gray pallor of a day-old corpse.
Set under the oppressive, overcast skies of Portland, Oregon, in 1971, "Drugstore Cowboy" boldly stakes out a piece of cinematic fringe territory, as seemingly remote as the chilly little corner of the world in which this dead-end road movie takes place. In a late-'80s America obsessed with winners, and a contemporary climate of anti-drug sentiment verging on hysteria, Van Sant has made a devastatingly funny, melancholy but unromanticized picture about a bedraggled band of doped-up losers -- with no apologies to (or excuses for) anybody. It's a shame you even feel the need to mention that this isn't a revisionist anti-drug tract, or a seductive glamorization of narcotics use/abuse. That much ought to be as apparent as it is irrelevant to what this movie's up to.
The first shot fixes us inside the consciousness of Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon, in a perfectly modulated performance), the 26-year-old leader of a scruffy, four-person pharmaceutical burglary ring. Staring semi-catatonically into the camera from his mattress, with hallucinatory lights playing across over his cold-sweat-glistened face, Bob appears to be either high or dying. Or both. He's fully aware of what is happening to him, and how he got here, but he doesn't (or can't) move. For the moment, he's just along for the ride. And he takes us with him, down a convoluted and dope-sodden memory lane.
"I was once a shameless, full-time drug fiend," Bob recalls in voiceover as he reminisces about his druggie days of not so long ago, when his family circle included his loyal partner/girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his earnestly dense, Saint Bernard-like buddy Rick (James Le Gross) and Rick's restive teenage girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham). All of these terrific performers -- along with William S. Burroughs as a defrocked, zoned-out junkie priest, James Remar as Bob's cop nemesis, Grace Zabriskie as Bob's scolding mom and Max Perlich as a neighborhood weasel -- inhabit their roles organically, never betraying any sense of superiority to their characters.
We first see Bob's crew in grainy, shaky 8mm home-movie memories, self-consciously goofy images of youthful, stoned innocence. These compulsive outlaws aren't greedy career criminals; they're benumbed rather than hardened. As they see it, they're just trying to make a living the best way they know how. And living, for them, means forever scrambling from one fix to the next, searching to sustain that elusive chemical high. Bob can't even wait until he gets home after pulling a job. He shoots up in the backseat of the getaway car and slumps against the window as little silhouetted, refrigerator-magnet images of cowboy hats and syringes slide down the glass, like shadowy floaters gliding across the surface of your eyeballs.
While the rest of the gang provides distraction, Bob trusts only himself to do the hands-on work, rifling through behind-the-counter pharmacy drawers for prime pills and injectables. He's ecstatic after a score, bragging about the street value of the loot, but he never gets around to selling any of it because of the insatiable habits of his consumer household. Dianne gets a sexual thrill from the drugs, but like the impotent Joe in Andy Warhol's Trash (one of this movie's funny, dopey ancestors), Bob isn't interested. He's already planning the next job, the next challenge. Looking for that imaginary pot of pharmeceuticals at the end of the rainbow, Bob gets as big a kick from stealing as he does from the illegally obtained substances themselves.
Bob and Dianne, who have settled into their roles as old man and old lady to the childlike Rick and Nadine, take their parental responsibilities seriously. In one hilarious living-room family conference, the stoned "parents" give the "kids" a wacked-out lesson in survival, solemnly explaining the oblique but somehow uncontestable reasons behind such superstitious house rules as No Dogs and Never Put a Hat on the Bed.
There's so much going on here: Bob and Dianne, intent upon impressing Rick and Nadine with the gravity of the matters at hand, seem to be talking themselves into believing their own implausible explanations, recalling the tragi-comic tale of a beloved housepet as if it were a nearly forgotten bad dream they once shared. Gullible Rick sincerely wants to believe them, but is surprised to find himself mildly skeptical. Still, he's good-natured enough to give Bob the benefit of any doubt. And Nadine -- like a brattly little girl who's always spoiling illusions by asking 'Why?' -- doesn't swallow a word of it, though she's too scared and insecure to admit it. She's tired of being Bob's scapegoat, the source of the hex he claims is bringing them bad luck.
Needless to say, this is not a movie about the "Just Say No" generation, although it does reveal some of the glibness behind that specious motto. "Just Say No" may make a fine slogan for a publicity campaign aimed at schoolchildren, but for junkies already driven by the desperate (and inevitably doomed) need to string out a perpetual chemical high, it's simply not a realistic option. Bob eventually decides to "Just Say No" -- but it takes a junkie's full-blown nightmare come true (smuggling a corpse out of a motel room during a sherriff's convention) to turn him around. Rather than face a lifetime hex, he decides trade in his illegal habit for an authorized methadone maintainence program and a regular job, even though he knows it means breaking up the family.
Bob's conversion isn't a triumph for sobriety, just another manifestation of his innate integrity. For Bob, the straight life proves scarcely any different from the high life -- you just trade one form of lucidity for another, one form of numbness for another. Drugs, he reasons (without irony), are just things people use "to relieve the pressures of everyday life, like tying their shoelaces." The toughest thing is learning to live with the uncertainty: "Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But dope fiends have a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles..." ~
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FILM INFORMATION: 'Drugstore Cowboy'
Web: Additional Cast, Details and Bios at IMDb
Director: Gus Van Sant
Writers: James Fogle (novel) & Gus Van Sant (screenplay)
Full Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Crime | Drama
Awards: 10 Wins & 4 Nominations
Runtime: 102 minutes
Spoken Language: English
Subtitles: n/a
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FILM CLIP: 'Drugstore Cowboy'
DOWNLOAD & EXTRACT FILM FILES: 'Drugstore Cowboy'
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| Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X' |
| Method 2.) Download and rejoin files with a program like HJ Split/Join (For PC) and (For Mac) use either MacHacha or Split and Concat. |
| Drugstore Cowboy.avi.001 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.003 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.005 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.007 | Drugstore Cowboy.avi.002 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.004 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.006 Drugstore Cowboy.avi.008 |
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