By Richard Horgan, FilmStew.com
Back in 1969, two of the very best Hollywood movies ever made about male friendship were released: Best Picture runner-up Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. While Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) were both cut from the same insouciant heroic cloth, the combination of two-bit hustler Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) and wide-eyed cowboy Joe Buck (Jon Voight) was a sad sack pairing for the ages, limping and strutting its way across a Manhattan morass of male prostitution, homelessness and urban indifference.
Cut to the Manhattan of 1994, a year that ironically was also graced by the release of the half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary Midnight Cowboy Revisited. That’s the setting for the new comedy-drama The Wackness (Sony Classics, July 3rd) and although this 2008 Sundance Film Festival fave is in no way as iconic an effort as John Schlesinger’s masterpiece, it does manage to connect to 1969’s Best Picture in a number of different ways, most notably in the form of thoroughly messed up psychiatrist Dr. Squires.
As portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley, this pot smoking puddle of regret is one of the few Big Apple personas to come close to Hoffman’s bag of Ratso Rizzo tricks. Having long since checked out of an unhappy marriage and his dutiful therapist obligations, Squires would rather pal around with enterprising young drug dealer Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), who pays for his sessions with carefully weighted quantities of golden Jamaican ganja.
At one point in The Wackness, the good doctor and Shapiro can be seen coming up over the rise of a hill, striding purposefully towards a business assignation. It would spoil things to reveal any more details, but let’s just say that in that moment, they look very much like Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck on the same New York City streets some three decades before. And it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that Kingsley as Squires is one of the very few actors who could possibly hope to match the acting chutzpah of Hoffman.
In Kingsley’s case, the limp of his character is mental, not physical, manifesting itself in the form of disheveled hair, scruffy clothes, foolish behavior (that’s how the much publicized make-out session with co-star Mary-Kate Olsen comes about) and choice bits of upside down advice. For example, at one point, Squires urges Shapiro to be sure to sleep with a black girl, something he sadly explains he was never able to pull off.
Other elements that link The Wackness to Midnight Cowboy include the grainy way in which writer-director Jonathan Levine’s film is shot and the intrinsic use of soundtrack music (though befitting the passage of time, the beat is now hip hop rather than some pretty song like Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talking” or Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.”) But above all, the cinematic kinship comes from the sight and sound of Kingsley, pitch-perfect American accent and all, putting on the moves of a quintessential loveable loser.
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