Tom RobbinsÆ 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is notable for its unique prose style that brilliantly depicted the free-wheeling counterculture of the 1970s replete with feminism, lesbianism, drugs, rebellion, mysticism and other counterculture highlights. Part of RobbinsÆ style is digression, and while it works so well in the novel, it doesnÆt work at all in the 1994 film version written and directed by Gus Van Sant. The theme and tone of RobbinsÆ novel are not captured by Van Sant, especially the tone. It may be that a successful film version of a novel that depends so heavily on writing style and tone just canÆt be made.
Van SantÆs film was first shown at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals in 1993, and it received such poor reception and bad reviews that the director re-edited the film before its 1994 commercial run. Once again, the film opened to generally poor reviews and also was not a commercial success. Much of the novelÆs humor, tenderness and liveliness ôcomes from the way it scatters all over the place. It takes off in verbal flights and digressionsà..Van SantÆs movie is all over the place, too, but that strategy makes the film scattershot instead of vibrantö (James, Movie Review: New York Times).
Van Sant keeps to the general plotline and thematic material, but often what should come across as ironic and meaningful, falls flat. Perhaps part of the problem is writing a script on a 1970s classic that so sharply represented its time and place in a later period in which the counterculture of the 1970s seems only nostalgic and a little silly. Van SantÆs script captures something of the playfulness of the 1970s but is too often arch instead of playful. ôIn a reverent panic to cram in all the key plot points of RobbinsÆ psychedelically enhanced story, Van Sant misses most of its sweet, sunny spirit. And RobbinsÆs loopy narrative descriptions are stuffed awkwardly into charactersÆ mouths as dialogu...