Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

Right up top we are told "This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy." OK, I'm down with that. But what it IS about is never totally clear. I think the filmmaker had some ideas, but never really figured it out. So it comes off as disorganized and uncertain, and therefore ultimately, fan service.

Particularly effective was a montage near the beginning intercutting shots from the movie with shots of New York streets in the same era. It is quite effective, as often the only way we can tell is the clarity of the footage itself. Really brings home that this movie was bringing to life a real time and place. And Jon Voight comes off really well in his interview snippets.

But the big problem here is a lack of organization and a clear point. The sprawling and ambiguous title itself should tell you something.

About half the movie is spent talking about homosexuality, ostensibly because there were a couple inferences to it in the movie. But it's WAY out of proportion, going into early portrayals of gay life in many other movies. Huh? Get back to the point, or rather, find one. My wife and I are big fans of Midnight Cowboy, seen it multiple times, and neither of us came away with anything overtly gay about it. Yet to watch this movie one would think they're talking about Brokeback Mountain. One interviewee who gets a lot of screen time (much more than Voight) is a transexual whose relation to Midnight Cowboy is never clear. While this person is a good interview and has a lot of interesting observations, his inclusion in the movie implies there is another motivation at play by the filmmaker. Who was that guy and why is he so central? Not clear.

Like so many low budget documentaries, this one suffers from their not having enough material and/or enough research to make a satisfying movie out of. So they took what they had, and what results is rather incoherent.

This is a nitpick, but the last few moments of the movie bring us to the most heart-wrenching scenes from the movie, interspersed with gruesome shots from the Vietnam War, and the music underscoring it is not Everybody's Talkin', not the soaring John Barry score (which we never hear except in a brief cover, they didn't get the rights to use it obviously) but "A Lover's Concerto" by the Toys, completely out of character, not to mention being from years before Midnight Cowboy or Vietnam and entirely out of character. It's really strange and totally undercuts the end of the documentary.