|
|
Main About Reviews Articles Links Contact Old Site |
Classification: Good Originally Published: Movie Poop Shoot, 7/14/04 |
|
EASY RIDER is dated. It has a meandering plot and passes off a load of drug-fueled gibberish as dialogue. It goes nowhere and ends abruptly. The title, which refers to a man who lives off of a wealthy woman who provides for him, has no bearing on the narrative. Though it is a crucial film in the history of Hollywood, it isn’t well regarded as much of a piece of art. I would dispute none of this, and yet I cannot help but feel taken with this strange, beautiful film.
The only event of any narrative significance occurs before the opening credits. Two bikers, a red, white, and blue-loving, leather-wearing dude named Wyatt (Peter Fonda), and a shaggy haired, Crocodile Dundee-looking guy named Billy (Dennis Hopper), score a load of coke in a Mexican junkyard, then resell it for a huge cash score. They hide the dough in Wyatt’s gas tank and head off towards Florida where they plan to retire. And that’s it; EASY RIDER merely follows the pair on their cross-country journey. A good portion of it features nothing more than shots of the two riding their choppers on the open road. But what beautiful images they are. The photography, by Laszlo Kovacs, looks and feels like pieces of late 1960s America as it really was, captured cinema verite style. I’ve seen plenty of bike movies, and plenty of road movies, but few films in either genre romanticize the idea of traveling this country with your buddies and your ride as effectively as EASY RIDER. I have never ridden a motorcycle before, and never had the desire to before, but something about this film’s idealized image of the open road appealed to me. Though Steppenwolf’s classic badass anthem “Born To Be Wild” backs the opening credits, EASY RIDER is not about being cool. It’s about being poetic while looking cool. Few films have more famous production horror stories. The DVD includes an insightful hour long documentary on the making of the film, and there are lengthy pieces on it in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, as well as the documentary of the same name. By all accounts, the shoot was a mess, the equivalent a train running too fast, threatening to derail at any moment. Hopper, who was heavily using drugs and booze during the period, was an megalomaniacal director. Most of his crew quit in protest while they were filming the Mardi Gras sequence, and an argument over the exposed stock led to a fistfight that spilled into Peter Fonda’s room where he was, according to certain accounts, in bed with both of RIDER’s leading ladies. Though the cocaine they score in the prologue is actually baking powder, all the marijuana in the movie - and they smoke the stuff in every scene - was real. The entire movie was made under a haze. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, all that excess, the movie has an undeniable authenticity. Enigmatic authenticity, but authenticity nonetheless. The commune of pathetic hippies, the bigoted rednecks in a Southern diner, the violent poachers, all feel more real that staged (in many cases Hopper preferred untrained locals over professional actors). There’s plenty of visual metaphors that link EASY RIDER to the Western and the last ride, and these quirky, seemingly pointless episodes send us on a strange trip through an American hell: visually beautiful yet emotionally and personally hollow; clearly of its era, yet simultaneously timeless. It has this genuineness of content, but Kovacs’ photography - all lens flares and endless tracking shots - is very obviously constructed for a fictional film. EASY RIDER is tied up in contradictions, but from those contradictions spring a unique, elusive charm. It is all of its flaws, and a great film because of them. |