Critic’s Notebook: Nancy Savoca’s ‘Dogfight,’ a ’90s Gem With Timely Resonance, Enters Criterion Collection
A good movie hug, one that’s more than a neat tie-up, can pack a wallop, especially in the final stretch of a gripping story. The proportions of bittersweet angst and healthy schmaltz vary. The situation might be a charged reunion, a heartrending goodbye or a romantic declaration. Films as unalike as It’s a Wonderful Life, E.T. and Reds offer memorable clinches. But I can’t think of a screen embrace as packed with complex emotion and metaphoric zing as the one that closes Dogfight.
Nancy Savoca’s 1991 drama, digitally restored and arriving April 30 in a Blu-ray special edition from the Criterion Collection, defies genre expectations at every turn. In certain ways — beautiful ways — it’s as winningly awkward as its protagonists, portrayed by two of the most gifted risk-takers of their generation, River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. Thoroughly cinematic yet also endearingly stagy (no wonder it inspired a musical adaptation), the movie casts a spell that feels timeless, no less so for being rooted in a specific era. Transcending us-vs.-them politics and calcified catchphrases, it’s political in the deepest sense, and in a way that feels especially timely as antiwar fervor galvanizes American youth (again).
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The tale of a callow Marine recruit’s attraction to an idealistic aspiring folksinger is a parable of innocence and experience, as well as a piercing look at narrow notions of male identity and unforgiving standards of female beauty. Set primarily in 1963, with a four-years-later coda, Dogfight captures a moment that was, in essence, the cusp of what we think of now as “the ’60s.” The main action unfolds just days before President Kennedy’s murder shocked a nation out of its postwar comfort. This was a charged and tender time in American culture, illuminated by the charged and tender hours that Phoenix and Taylor’s characters spend together.
Working from a screenplay by Bob Comfort that drew upon his experiences in the Marine Corps, director Savoca and producer Richard Guay (her husband) crafted an unconventional love story. The central couple’s initial encounter is full of sweetness (hers) and swagger (his), but this is a meet-cute sparked by vile and stupid misogyny. The movie’s title refers to a contest the enlisted men conduct on their last night stateside: Whoever brings the date deemed “ugliest” to a party wins a cash prize.
It was Savoca’s second film, after her scrappy indie True Love, a wry X-ray of the pressure to wed that won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize. Dogfight took her into the studio fold, but, thankfully, the higher production budget doesn’t impose a distancing gloss on this intimate story. A spirit of idiosyncrasy fuels every moment. The supporting performances (including the brief big-screen debut of Brendan Fraser) are well etched, and the two exceptional leads dig deep without the least bit of showiness. With Seattle standing in for San Francisco in most scenes, the great-looking and smartly designed film is suffused with an element of make-believe, an aura that lends it the impact of a fable, even as the characters and their moment-to-moment drama pull you in.
Taylor, who was 23 when she took on the role of Rose Fenny, had made an impression in the coming-of-age features Mystic Pizza and Say Anything. Phoenix was only 19 during production, and already an Oscar-nominated star (for Running on Empty, in which he played a gentle soul who was, by all accounts, closer to his offscreen pacifist self than the gung-ho jarhead in Dogfight). In a new interview for the Criterion release, Savoca says that when Warner Bros. cast Phoenix, it gave him approval over Dogfight‘s director. He chose wisely; what might have turned into a broad teen comedy in less sensitive hands is instead an unclassifiable gem that grows more luminous with each viewing.
Not unlike James Dean and John Cazale, Phoenix, who died in 1993, left behind a filmography that’s as extraordinary as it is tragically brief, and Dogfight is among the highlights. The Marine he plays, Eddie Birdlace, is about to turn 19, and not far beneath his bullshitter bravado, he’s a na?ve kid. In San Francisco on the eve of his deployment to Okinawa, he’s hoping for an uncomplicated assignment to Vietnam — a place where, he and the rest of America have been told, the United States is taking a purely “advisory” role. What a difference a few months and a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution can make. (Savoca, who was born in 1959, has recalled watching young men in her working-class Bronx neighborhood go off to Vietnam “proudly and with great zeal.”)
By no means a “dog,” even by the cruel standards of immature boys, Taylor’s Rose is Eddie’s last-ditch hope for a date to the dogfight. Taking stock of her uncool bouffant and sheltered vibe, he sees her contest potential. But it’s clear that he sees something else, too, in this waitress strumming a guitar in a secluded corner of her mother’s diner — that he feels something unexpected when she responds to his come-on, her words as free of pretense as his are loaded with it, her voice suggesting the textured sheen of raw silk.
On their night out, with its twists and turns, they’re children playing dress-up — her hairspray and fusty organza, his thrift-store dinner jacket. And they’re young grown-ups peeling off the remnants of the ’50s, the prescribed roles, though she’s certainly more ready to do so.
The youngest in a long line of Roses, she takes inspiration from the pantheon of folksingers whose photos grace her bedroom walls. That her watchful mother is played by a renowned folksinger (and occasional actor), Holly Near, is more than a nice touch; with only a few lines and several pointed glances, Near conveys a single mother’s backstory, no explication necessary.
A phrase that came to mind the last time I watched Dogfight is “the woman who slept with men to take the war out of them,” the memorable title of an early-’80s novel by Deena Metzger. Rose has hardly taken on such a specific project, but her sincerity has a cleansing, awakening effect on Eddie. Bit by bit, her fierce innocence gets to him, whether she’s being gentle and patient or slugging him for participating in the dogfight.
Savoca and Taylor would join forces again for Household Saints (recently restored), in which the religious calling of Taylor’s character puts her at odds with those around her. But Rose’s purity is one of exuberance and connection to the world. Responding to her openheartedness, Eddie wants to make it up to her after the humiliation of the contest.
And Savoca’s openheartedness toward the guys playing their mean-spirited games is its own spark of connection. Watching Eddie’s buddies strut their foolish stuff, you can’t help thinking about how young they are, and what they’re heading into. You want them to make it out alive — unscathed, if such a thing is possible. The morning after their long night in the city, Eddie and dogfight winner Berzin (a superb Richard Panebianco) privately acknowledge that they’re on to each other’s secrets and lies. More than this, in a few tossed-off lines they tap into the awful joke that keeps the world spinning, one that’s far more insidious than their vulgar contest.
Looking back at a particular time of escalating warfare, Savoca offers a prism of tradition and nonconformity. “Unpredictable” doesn’t begin to describe what she conjures with Taylor and Phoenix in Dogfight, a true romance with a powerful undertow. Through the eyes of two serious souls, working-class kids whose seduction scene involves a granny nightgown and the brand-new Dylan album, the world looks endlessly navigable. That might be why the hug in its closing moments hits deeper on every viewing, and why Eddie and Rose look both stronger to me and more fragile each time I see their story.
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