Midnight Cowboy

This was chosen as part of the quest my wife and I are on to watch every Best Picture winner. All I've ever really known about this movie was 1) it's where the "I'm walkin' here!" line comes from, and 2) it's the only X-rated movie to ever win the Academy Award (although that rating would come down to an R in a re-review). I wasn't sure what to expect. The story of Midnight Cowboy, as much as it can be said to have one, is about Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a naive young man from Texas who moves to New York City with big dreams of becoming a male prostitute for older, rich women. He ends up befriending Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), a pickpocket, con artist, and all-around sleazeball. And that's about it. It's their experiences together. Midnight Cowboy reminds me a lot of Easy Rider, in that it is a movie that is not only of its time, but freezes time. It does to 1969 what amber does to the mosquito in Jurassic Park. To Midnight Cowboy's credit, it does so less than Easy Rider. The latter was a broken, ambling mess of a movie that actively repelled anybody who wasn't there. Midnight Cowboy, at least, doesn't rely on hippie idealism and the zeitgeist of the time to inform its very nature. Midnight Cowboy is of a time, and there are aspects of it that seem unrelatable 45 or years later, but it isn't so swallowed up in itself that is impenetrable. A large part of that is due to the acting of Voight and Hoffman. Voight's wide-eyed innocence is charming and endearing, while Hoffman isn't untrustworthy, but you know he'd throw Voight under the bus if it got him a hot and a cot. And then there's the third character, New York City itself. This movie is quintessentially New York. The streets, the condemned buildings, the diners, the subway, and the red light district, all of it is so fundamentally NYC of the time. It's a fascinating time capsule. But the good acting doesn't make up for the fact that this movie just doesn't have much movie in it. Dumb farm kid goes to the big city, gets in over his head. It's a bleak movie, and with no real character arcs for either of the leads. Joe Buck has gone through some stuff by the end, but there's no sign he's any smarter, or at least more street-smart, by the end. The same can be said of Hoffman's character, who is never as clever or slick as he thinks he is, and has put all his chips into a change of location that won't change who he is. I found it difficult to care about the fates of these two, because there's nothing to hold onto that they will grow or change. It's very much just "here's a few months in the lives of two people". That may be realistic, but for a story, it's rather unsatisfying. It's definitely the kind of movie the Academy favors, but I don't think it was the best on offer that year (Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid runs circles around this), and it's nothing I could see coming back to or recommending.