September 28, 1990| It’s 1984 in the Texas town of Anarene, and things have changed a lot in the 30-odd years since the last picture show closed down.
Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), the high-school jock with the quick smile and the quicker temper, has made and lost a fortune in the oil business. When he isn’t moping around in his poolside hot tub, he frets about his staggering debts — $12 million, and still counting — and wonders just when he lost control of his feisty, free-spending wife, Karla (Annie Potts), his aggressively self-indulgent children, and his life.
Still, all Duane needs to do is drive his pickup into town, and hang around the failing bank or the bustling Dairy Queen, to trip all over folks who are even worse off.
Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid), the goofy rich kid who grew up to become a bank president, faces multiple indictments for fraud. Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), the tremulous lad who’s now mayor of Anarene, has a failing memory and a faltering grip on reality. Some nights, he can be found down the street from his convenience store looking at movies only he can see in the ruins of the long-closed picture show.
And then there’s Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), the beautiful heartbreaker Duane loved and lost so many years ago. She moved away to Europe and became a B-movie superstar, acquiring husbands, children and a lurid mystique along the way. But now, after the accidental death of her young son, she’s back in Anarene, living in seclusion. Duane is curious, and maybe even still a mite lustful, but he doesn’t have the gumption to call on Jacy. Besides, there are too many other women in town with claims on his time.
Texasville is the big ol’ mess of a movie that strains to contain all these characters and complications. It is a sequel to The Last Picture Show, the classic 1971 film that, like Texasville, was adapted from a Larry McMurtry novel by director-screenwriter Peter Bogdanovich, and shot on location in and around Archer City.
But while Last Picture Show was a dark, stark drama of declining fortunes and dead-end lives, Texasville is a sassy, sexy comedy about growing up and wising up, percolating with rude vigor even during its moments of wistful melancholy. From its inspired opening shot to its poignantly funny resolution, it is a bodacious passel of fun.
Bogdanovich has been enormously fortunate in reassembling many of the same fine actors who made Last Picture Show so memorable. A great deal has happened to them, and to the characters they portray, in the past two decades. And, indeed, in some cases, it appears life is imitating art.
For example: Jeff Bridges, whose Duane was more or less a secondary character in Last Picture Show, has moved forward to become the chief focus of the sequel, just as Bridges has thrived for the past two decades as one of Hollywood’s most consistently accomplished lead actors.
In sharp contrast, Timothy Bottoms’ Sonny has receded into the background, amiable and endearing but somehow just not as compelling as he used to be. You could say something very similar about Bottoms and his current status as an actor.
As Jacy, Cybill Shepherd has a very funny moment when, asked if it’s fun to be a movie star, she replies, only half-jokingly, “Not unless you’re more of one than I was.” The line is even funnier when you consider the direction Shepherd’s movie career took after Last Picture Show, especially after the end of her off-screen relationship with Bogdanovich.
All of which serves to enhance the serious undercurrents of Texasville. At heart, this is a movie about the painful tasks of coming to terms with the past, appreciating what the present has to offer — and, most challenging of all, acting your age.
Duane, beefy and brooding, spends most of his time in a bemused funk, at once depressed and entertained by his inability to keep things from falling apart. For all his casual randiness and easygoing good humor, he considers himself a man perilously close to the edge, what with the oil bust, his wacky family and the county’s “Old Texasville Centennial” celebration to contend with. Not even his blunt-spoken dynamo of a wife can convince him that, no, he really isn’t as suicidal as he thinks he is.
When Jacy, just as alluring as ever, drops back into his life, it’s just one more complication, one more emotion, Duane cannot rule. And things get positively scary for him when Jacy becomes Karla’s best friend, and they spend a lot of long afternoons sharing secrets and trading memories.
Texasville is structured as a series of brief, loosely connected scenes, some of them only a few seconds long, almost all of them with a kicky punchline. The best episode is one of the shortest: Duane, drink in hand, wanders out to the patio of his expensive new home, and sees Jacy and Karla, weeping and wailing in a drunken conversation, at poolside. Duane takes a long, silently apprehensive look at this display of sisterly solidarity, and then quickly goes back inside.
Here and elsewhere, Texasville is dedicated to the proposition that, even after the passing of years and the getting of wisdom, men will never understand women as completely as women understand men, and each other. There is a provocatively erotic charge to Duane’s early scenes alone with Jacy. But when Jacy announces she wants something much more intimate than a rekindled affair — she wants an open, honest friendship — Duane is befuddled, maybe even a little frightened.
And he’s scarcely more at ease as he discovers that many of the footloose married women in town have already been tapped by his 21-year-old son, Dickie (William McNamara), an indefatigable stud who doesn’t realize just how irresistible he is.
Bridges is terrific as Duane, an ageing good ol’ boy who is by turns robust and weak-willed in dealings with friends, family and even his faithful dog. As Jacy, Shepherd has to shoulder most of the movie’s heavy dramatic moments, and she carries the burden with winning grace and sharp wit. And, yes, to answer the inevitable question, she still looks great, even without makeup.
Annie Potts, a newcomer to the Anarene ensemble, brings out the best in her co-stars, but plays for keeps when there is serious competition to steal scenes. Her brassy portrayal of Karla is the kind of high-octane work that delights audiences and wins awards.
Quaid and Bottoms make the most of their repeat performances, as do Cloris Leachman, whose anxious Ruth Popper is now Duane’s no-nonsense secretary, and Eileen Brennan, whose hard-bitten Genevieve Morgan has left waitressing to work at Sonny’s convenience store. It’s nice to have them around again.
Bogdanovich wrote the juicily flavorsome script, which preserves meaty chunks of tasty dialogue from McMurtry’s novel, and directs at an engagingly unhurried pace. He wants us to savor every crazy moment in Anarene, a place where adultery, conspicuous consumption and adolescent self-indulgence are not merely pastimes, they are spectator sports.
As a filmmaker, Bogdanovich hasn’t done much of note since his early success with The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon). Texasville isn’t quite a return to glory, but it is a grandly entertaining film, and should qualify by anyone’s standards as a smashing comeback. It’s nice to have Bogdanovich around again, too.
