Midnight Cowboy

"Midnight Cowboy" comes heartbreakingly close to being the movie we want it to be. The performances have a flat, painful accuracy. The world of Times Square, a world of people without hope and esteem, seems terribly real. Here is America's underbelly and it even smells that way. And seeing these things and reaching to them, we are ready to praise the movie where we found them. And cannot.

There has been a failure somewhere in the director's faith in his materials. John Schlesinger has not been brave enough to tell his story and draw his characters with the simplicity they require. He has taken these magnificent performances, and his own careful perception of American society, and dropped them into an offensively trendy, gimmick-ridden, tarted-up, vulgar exercise in fashionable cinema. Trying to get the good out of "Midnight Cowboy" is like looking at a great painting through six inches of Jell-O. It is there -- the greatness is there -- but unworthy hands have meddled with it almost beyond repair.

Joe Buck and Ratso are castaways in "Midnight Cowboy." They go their own way, cold and wet, thrown out with the garbage, sharing their dreams of Florida or the ultimate rich broad. They go their own way, live their own lives, become two of the permanent inhabitants of our imagination, like Bonnie and Clyde.

They exist apart from the movie, outside of it. Their real lives have nothing to do with Andy Warhol parties, or escort services, or hard Park Avenue dames. And who can really believe they would ever find themselves on that bus to Florida? It is cruel to take the reality of Times Square -- the existence of the real people like Ratso and Joe -- and tell their story as if it were a soap opera. The form that has been imposed on this story simply will not fit.

That would not be an objection under ordinary circumstances. If "Midnight Cowboy" were not potentialy such a good movie, we would care a great deal less. But this movie gives us so much that we want it all. We have been to hundreds of movies, and we hardly care anymore that most of them are lousy. We understand that. What is unbearable is a movie that could have been great, that could have touched us, and lost courage.

The basis of "Midnight Cowboy" is one of the essential American myths: The eager youth comes from the country to the city, and his simplicity and freshness are ground up in the urban jungle. Dreiser wrote this story, and Sherwood Anderson, and it is still a good story because it tells what happens every day. It is an entry in the genre "the education of ..." And you can fill in Tom Jones or Hyman Kaplan, Eugene Gant or Joe Buck. What matters is how well the education is perceived. What happens to the hero? What experiences shape his new life and from his idea of himself?

The basic thing that happens to Joe Buck is that he meets Ratso, a person entirely outside his experience. Ratso is well named. Like a rat, he makes his own way in the city, hated, asking no favors, living the life he knows. But Ratso has a measure of humanity. So does Joe Buck. They come together because there is no other way to turn. "Midnight Cowboy" should have been about their mutual self-discovery; about the process that took place as they learned to know each other.

Instead, it reaches outside this relationship for a string of melodramatic scenes that will not do. The most offensive, of course, is the Warhol-type psychedelic party. This party has been done and overdone in dozens of films. It provides an excuse for the cameraman to exercise his skill and for the editor to give up a few easy glimpses of skin. Insofar as it is not a ciche, it is a handy way to sneak in one more rock song for the sound-track album. In the real world, let's face it, there is almost no chance of Joe and Ratso being invited to such a party (even assuming they were still being given anywhere outside of movies). More likely the rich girl (so finely played by Brenda Vaccaro) would pick up Joe or someone like him on 42nd St.