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Ever watched a movie and gone “If I could yank that part out of the film and change this around it would make it so much better?” Cause Midnight Cowboy is that movie for me. In parts a completely realized and unique masterpiece, and in others a needlessly distracting and experimental holdover from the 60s.
As a portrait of two lost and hurt souls reaching through the urban decay and finding companionship with each other, Midnight Cowboy soars high. The problem is that the comedown from the swinging sixties causes us to insert needless dives into Warhol’s Factory and other flashy moments which distract from the grimy and gloomy study of these two men beautifully played by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.
Katharine Hepburn has famously stated that the right actors win Oscars for the wrong roles, and no actor better exemplifies that quote then Dustin Hoffman. Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man don’t exactly spring immediately to mind when I think of his most award-worthy and iconic work, The Graduate and Cowboy are. His Ratso is one of the greatest performances of all-time for me. Hoffman disappears and in his place is only this sickly, hard-edged street operator. It’s one hell of a performance as Hoffman descends into more desperation and by the end looks like walking pestilence and death.
And Voight meets him halfway. Midnight Cowboy is a two-hander, and if either performance didn’t click into place the entire thing would topple in on itself. And Voight’s dim-witted Texan who comes to New York to be a gigolo is a nice counter-balance to Hoffman’s cynicism. His character is almost like a sweet-natured Labrador dropped into the middle of the seediest kennel you could imagine, and he plays it perfectly. His character develops a cocksure walk and possesses a naïve handsomeness that visually works in synchronicity with Hoffman’s shorter, dirtier and curled up posture. The character’s questionable sexuality – the film seems to want to point towards him being gay, but never really commits is a sin of a script that can’t decide what it wants to do with this thread.
So why doesn’t Midnight Cowboy work entirely effectively? Far too many detours into situations and characters that don’t add anything of deep significance to the main narrative or the bigger theme of the film, and these scenes are too artsy and remove us from the truth of the film and call too much attention to themselves. Would these penniless drifters truly find themselves in a party with Warhol’s superstars? I don’t believe so, and this entire segment could be removed with relative ease and the film would only be the better for it. I also don’t know if I completely believe the film’s climax occurring with them hopping on a bus to Florida and trying to find that happy ending. The world of the film is Times Square when that was a dirty place.
In the end, Midnight Cowboy is the story of two souls struggling valiantly to survive and be a little less lonely. Every time the film swerves away from this basic conceit it ends up hurting it more than anything. But what is great is amongst some of the most ambitious and well-crafted film-making of the 1960s. I truly get why so many call this film essential, but I think many of us have done a mental self-edit of some of the more unnecessary parts of the film. But the central performances/characters are so finely detailed and thoroughly defined that all else almost doesn’t even matter.
