It’s not a super abundant genre, but I do love a movie where two young romantics spend a night together and slowly start to develop an irresistible bond. From Before Sunrise to My Night at Maud’s to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, it’s just a really charming genre and one that taps into the idea that anything is possible when you’re young and naive and the night offers no expectations but a good time. Granted, I don’t recall any films in this genre that begin with one of the two romantic leads doing something really shitty to the other person and then spending the rest of the movie learning to be less of a jerk.
While Dogfight doesn’t share a ton in common with my earlier Criterion pick Ashes and Diamonds, they both take place over the course of a very consequential night in history. As Ashes and Diamonds took place on the last day of World War II, Dogfight takes place on the night before John F. Kennedy was shot, which really sets the scene for its whole “last night of innocence” vibe. We’re first introduced to Eddie Birdlace (played by River Phoenix), a corporal in the army who has just arrived in San Francisco for one night out with the boys before he’s about to ship out overseas. He and his gang of army ding-dongs have arrived in the city while making a wager that whoever of them can find the ugliest date to a dance that night known as a “dogfight” wins a cash prize.
Birdlace sets off on this ill-intentioned quest by trying to pick up various, well, homely women around town but is eventually told to scram by all of them. He then winds up in a place called Rose’s Diner, and after trying to pick up Rose herself, he settles on Rose’s daughter, who’s also named Rose (Lilli Taylor). Eddie strikes up a conversation with Rose, phonily flirting with her and managing to convince her to go to the dogfight with her. However, in the build-up to the dogfight, Eddie starts to exhibit some reservations about going to the dance, seemingly because he likes her or perhaps because he’s just a little bit nicer than his piggish army buddies.
Either way, Rose doesn’t win the dogfight, but after drinking too much and throwing up in the bathroom, she talks with the winner of the dogfight, who informs her of the whole point of the dance. Understandably, she yells at Eddie and storms off, never wanting to see him again for putting her through something so rotten. Rose then goes back home and listens to her beloved folk records, but as she’s about to go to bed, she hears Eddie trying to climb up to her room and leave a note asking her to meet him. Despite her reservations, Eddie apologizes profusely and explains that he was uneasy about taking her to the dogfight, so he asks if she’d like to go get a proper dinner with him.
They end up going to a fancy restaurant, which initially turns them away for not being dressed fancy enough, but Eddie grabs a sport coat from a thrift store, and they live it up with a fancy meal. They then go to an assortment of random places downtown, including an arcade where they find an empty backroom with a bunch of old-timey musical machines and end up swooning in each other’s arms. They also, of course, get to know each other better: Rose wants to be a folk singer like her heroes Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, while Eddie admits that he’s about to ship out to “this little country called Vietnam” where he doesn’t expect much action.
After sleeping together in Rose’s bed, the two of them promise to stay in touch, and Eddie heads back to meet up with his army buddies, who had gone on their own separate adventures that night while Eddie was out with Rose. We then see Rose and her mother the next day, watching the inevitable news on TV that President Kennedy has been shot. We also surprisingly do get a brief sequence of Eddie in Vietnam, where many of his colleagues are shot in action while he ends up wounding his leg. This results in Eddie ending up back in San Francisco a few years later, wisened and ravaged by war, noticing that everyone in SF seems to be a hippie now. Which, of course, lands Eddie on the doorstep of Rose’s Diner, where he sees Rose, just a few years older, but with the same warm feelings for Eddie.
Based on the description of Dogfight, it would be easy to write it off as one of many ’90s dramedies that cashed in on boomer nostalgia for the ’60s. Yet, there’s something about the way the film zeroes in on a very specific moment in the ’60s that certainly picks up on defining aspects of the decade (Vietnam, protest music, the Kennedy assassination, San Francisco’s cultural rise), but doesn’t aim to sum the decade up necessarily. Leave that silliness for Forrest Gump. Instead, it’s more of a clear-eyed look at what promise and optimism the decade squandered, but how ordinary folks like Eddie and Rose managed to find themselves anyway.
There’s also an extra layer of poignancy to the fact that River Phoenix is the beating heart of this film, an actor who had a Kennedy-esque air of potential that was cut short all too soon. It’s also nice to see Taylor get to star in a film for once with a character who’s equally endearing and complicated, even if the film’s premise is initially a little mean to her. She and Phoenix have a very sweet chemistry together, exhibiting a kind of sincerity and pureness that you can only have when you’re in that age in between adolescence and adulthood. It’s a film that’s just a really charming, funny watch, and it’s a crime that it’s always been as obscure as it is.
Two Fun Facts:
- This is the first time I can ever recall seeing Seattle play San Francisco in a movie. Apparently some of it was shot in Seatown, which I probably wouldn’t have noticed if there hadn’t been one scene in which the characters walk by the Paramount Theater.
- The movie marks the first on-screen appearance of Brendan Fraser, whose only line was “how’d you like to eat my shit?”