Review of Midnight Cowboy (1969) by Jake R — 14 Jun 2008

With the success of 'Brokeback Mountain' as a straight-forward gay love story, the 36 year gap between it and 'Midnight Cowboy' has allowed for a more insightful examination of the complex relationship of its central 'couple'. While I personally don't believe Ratso and Joe to be lovers, I recognise there is a powerful friendship between them that brings them closer physically as well as emotionally. It's a convincing, complimentary and cute relationship, made all the more poignant because the pair, while having good intentions and trying hard to look after each other, ultimately have no idea how to succeed at living. Dreaming is so important to them that they forget to survive, but it's also partly because they can't. These aren't people who are going to be saved by anyone, the unseen refuse of society that isn't given a chance at life.

Hoffman and Voight are incredible, giving career-defining performances. Both should have received a joint Academy Award that year, for such nuanced, believable performances. Framed against an appallingly seedy, grimy New York - a prototype for the hell on earth of Taxi Driver - Joe and Ratso's relationship appears to be the purest aspect of the film; indeed, the only positive aspect of the film as well. They also appear to be the sanest, as the rest of the characters seem to be the hidden eccentrics within society that ultimately bring about its impenetrable corruption: adulterous housewives, homosexual prowlers, pretentious party-goers, jealous rural rednecks, quirky silent types, religious fanatics and uncaring authority figures all make up a colourful patchwork of the inhabitants of America in the late 1960s. What a time it was.

John Schlesinger has made a wonderful film, brilliantly directing a great cast and utilitising disorienting cinematography and editing to match the sometimes uneasy mood of the characters. At times it resembles the European films of the period and their experimenting with the elements of film itself, but Schlesinger has welded this new style to content that is of a new age, the beginning of an amazing creative period in Hollywood history. This film showed that boundaries of explicit sex and violence didn't have to be broken in a negative way, and despite having a sad, down-beat ending one feels happy, grateful almost, of having the chance to meet these characters and get so involved with them. That is Schlesinger's brilliance; some critics have labelled him heartless, but he was not about this. Only someone who loved film as much as he loved people could make something so touching and so human.