Summary
The Tribeca Film Festival lives: online! This highly talked-about award winner tackles some important issues while subverting more than one genre.
When the Tribeca Film Festival went digital this year, Anna Kerrigan’s feature debut was one of the films selected to screen online for the media. It’s easy to see why: with a string of shorts and Funny or Die pieces under her belt, this unconventional take on a transgender narrative arrives in the guise of a modern western.
Already a winner of a best actor award for Steve Zahn and best screenplay for Kerrigan, COWBOYS is a film that defies expectations on a number of levels. It begins against the backdrop of a strained relationship between the mentally ill Troy (Zahn), his wife Sally (Jillian Bell) and their child Joe (Sasha Knight).
Kerrigan opens with Troy and Joe travelling on horseback in rural Montana and heading for the Canadian border, backed by John Wakayama Carey’s stunning photography. What slowly emerges is the realisation that Joe is transgender, and Troy is on a misguided mission to ‘rescue’ Joe from his misunderstanding mother.
“I’m not a tomboy,” protests Joe in a touching coming out scene to his father. “A tomboy’s just another type of girl but I’m not a girl.” It feels like an obvious line out of context, especially when coupled with his contention that he thinks “aliens put me in this girl body as a joke.” Yet this singular summation acts as an impetus for the main thrust of the film, a western fugitive chase.
It’s also significant because it makes the film less about Joe ‘coming of age’ than it does about Troy and Sally coming to terms with it. Troy is ostensibly an unequivocal support, but once he goes off his medication the chaotic and sometimes violent swings are another confusing model of manhood for Joe. Sally’s wilful misgendering of Joe feels more authentic, as Bell plays against type in a not wholly likeable character who is frustrated by having to play the strict mother. “No wonder she wants to be a boy,” Sally exclaims in anger at one point. “She thinks I’m a goddamn piece of shit.”
Kerrigan allows these traits to unfold over the course of a non-linear film, one where Troy’s ‘abduction’ of Joe is not evident from the start and the crumbling of his marriage is explained in a fragmentary fashion. Pursued by a cop – an underused Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale) in an inspired bit of casting that lands somewhere between Frances McDormand in Fargo and Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive – these threads begin to coalesce.
It’s just that all of these pieces are an awkward fit when they do finally form that larger picture. Despite some ordeals along the way, the ultimate resolution comes together a little too quickly. Furthermore, Troy’s mental health is more plot-driven than exploratory and runs the risk of being a throwaway quirk.
Nevertheless, as an empathetic alternative to the ‘tragic transgender story’ that has dominated cinema for the last few years (such as Lukas Dhont’s Girl), COWBOYS is a step in the right direction while simultaneously subverting the neo-western sub-genre.
2020 | US | DIRECTOR: Anna Kerrigan | WRITER: Anna Kerrigan | CAST: Steve Zahn, Jillian Bell, Sasha Knight, Ann Dowd | DISTRIBUTOR: Tribeca Film Festival | RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | RELEASE DATE: April/May 2020 (Tribeca)
