Texasville

Director:  Peter Bogdanovich
Year Released:  1990
Rating:  2.0

The surviving characters from The Last Picture Show are brought back 'thirty' (or so) years later - I can't fault Larry McMurtry for wanting to update his characters (Joseph Heller did the same thing with his Catch 22 creations in Closing Time) but I'm not sure what Bogdanovich had in mind with this rambling, cartoonish screen adaptation. Duane (Jeff Bridges) scoots around town like a modern Odysseus, witnessing one crazy scene after another and dealing with one crazy person after another - hysterical women, troublesome kids, jealous husbands, old coots who fall out of trucks, a (single) religious freak and so on - and can't get his own marriage sorted out, so he just cheats on his wife. It's flippant and random until the final scene, where it tries for emotional catharsis with the starry-eyed Timothy Bottoms character. Could have been a bittersweet portrait of aging and regret but only gets half-way there; having spent some time in Texas, I'm not sure this is the best possible advertisement for the state.

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