There's nothing more down-home American than working a minimum wage job to survive, riding mechanical bulls every night, and slapping your wife when she doesn't listen to you. Yeehaw! James Bridges' Urban Cowboy is a decent slice-of-life film that really embodies everything that the Texas way of life had to offer. Starring a young John Travolta in his prime and breakout star Debra Winger, this movie has a lot to say about this culture, for better or worse depending on the perspective of the viewer. While so much of this film's substance has aged horribly and the script does not do a very good job of making the audience root for this supposed protagonist at all, there is something about its cultural placement that makes it stand out amongst many other '80s films. Perhaps because a big name like John Travolta was able to revitalize country music and that way of life, but regardless of this movie's script deficiencies, it is still a dramatic and gorgeously-made film.
Finally moving out of his childhood home, Bud (John Travolta) decides to move to Texas to begin his own rootin', tootin' life. He finds a job from his Uncle Bob (Barry Corbin) and as he is settling in, meets a beautiful young woman at a bar named Sissy (Debra Winger). The two eventually realize that their relationship is a lot more complicated than initially expected, as they both experience the ups and downs of life and love in their shared Houston bar. I have never really thought of John Travolta as a great actor. While he was an undeniable heartthrob in this era and is effective nonetheless, none of his performances ever really come to mind when I think of solid acting. Perhaps that is because of the way that his characters are written. This script had much potential to be a truer story of realizing faults in your upbringing but fails to give that pleasant closure to its audience. I had a very difficult time sympathizing with the character of Bud, mostly because he really did not change at all throughout this film. His marriage to Sissy begins the same night that he assaulted her in a restaurant and wrestled with her in the parking lot, without seeing any fault. I will always understand that "times were different" and not many people took issue with this when the film was released, but it is very hard not to, especially nowadays. I did not ever root for Travolta's character, which I was hoping would change if he had learned what an antagonistic person he had become. I did really enjoy the fact that James Bridges and Aaron Latham gave enough screentime for Sissy to develop as her own person as much as Bud, but the way that they handled these women characters, in the end, was still unacceptable. I was hoping that Bud would have learned his lesson and changed for the better, but the constant abuse towards Sissy continued as she went right back to him (leaving one abusive partner for another). Other than my issues with the undeserved resolutions of these characters, Urban Cowboy does a decent job, for better or worse, of telling a slice-of-life story of how Texan life influenced this young buck.
If any genre of music was in desperate need of being revived in the late 20th century, filmmakers knew that John Travolta was the man to save it. Starting with disco in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta must have held some kind of secret that he used to make these cultures relevant again. With Urban Cowboy, country music was not entirely gone but was beginning to fade from popular culture and the film did a fantastic job of bringing it back. If there is truly anything that one can take away from this film, it's that it holds such a critical place in the zeitgeist of country music in the 1980s. It's very interesting to look back now and see how this film has left its huge impact. However, while I did not have any grade of expectations for this movie, I was pleasantly surprised at how stupendous its production was. The cinematography from Reynaldo Villalobos was incredible and provided a whole other layer of storytelling through his use of objects and locations that were otherwise absent in the script. I was consistently taken aback by how well he was able to make the same environment constantly interesting. David Rawlins' editing worked very well too, letting the story breathe and despite feeling a bit long, was able to really capture the tone of the most important scenes.
Urban Cowboy, despite its often distasteful script and disregard of marital faithfulness, is exactly what the title suggests: a more modern version of the traditional cowboy archetype. While country music and culture were on a great decline in the '70s, James Bridges and John Travolta practically resuscitated it and brought it back to its feet with this film alone. This movie's legacy and soundtrack are solid and it is definitely worth a watch just because of that.
My Rating: ★★★
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