It’s November 1963. Among a group of Marines staying in San Francisco briefly before being shipped off to Asia, there is a contest: pick up the least attractive girl you can find, take them to a bar they’ve all rented out for the night, and a cash prize will be handed to the guy who brings the ugliest one. It’s called a “Dogfight”—the women being the “dogs,” if you haven’t guessed—and one of them, Corporal Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix), is shit out of luck finding a date.
That is, until he meets Rose (Lili Taylor), a wannabe folk songstress who waits tables at a café owned by her mother. Birdlace fakes his way through a conversation about music in order to ensnare her, and she is shyly charmed. It is obvious how unaccustomed she is to the attentions of men, especially cute, seemingly confident young men like Birdlace.
After some wooing, and an initial refusal, Rose accepts his proposition. She prepares herself, albeit inelegantly, and there’s a humorous little moment when Birdlace first sees her evening get-up, and he almost can’t believe his good fortune.
But something unexpected happens. Right before they go into the bar, Birdlace tries to smear more lipstick on Rose to make her look ridiculous, clownish, even. Rose, however, for all her shyness, isn’t stupid. She laughingly stops him and reverses his attempt—and this might be the first significant instance of Birdlace recognizing Rose’s dignity as a human being, and not a prop for the men’s cruel amusement.
Her dignity, and also her beauty, which strikes him as unexpectedly as his later realizations of how foolish he and his fellow enlistees really are, underneath all the lust and posturing.
Dogfight, directed by Nancy Savoca from a script penned by Bob Comfort, is what you may call a “love story” but not in any grander sense of the term. It is simply about how two young people, in a single night, learn to understand one another after a serious betrayal of trust, and thus begin the process of love—which may or may not result in the sort of happy ending more conventional tales are satisfied to show.
On the surface, Birdlace and Rose couldn’t be more different: the corporal is cocksure, boyish, trading dirty jokes with three of his Marine pals (together forming the Four B’s, having all met during basic training as they were grouped alphabetically by last name) and all too willing to participate in the misogynistic contest. Rose is sheltered and naïve, and very much the Sensitive Artist type, although there’s nothing poseurish about her: she cares deeply for others, and is capable of righteous anger against any injustice.
And she is perceptive, seeing right through the flimsy bonds which formed the Four B’s (although sometimes with guys, it is that easy) and, when she gets wise to the Dogfight, viciously attacks Birdlace and stands up for the honor of the other women before even her own. Birdlace, although he’d ineptly attempted to draw Rose away from the dance the more his conscience needled him, can only but receive her blows, much to the amusement of the other soldiers.
Birdlace, however, is not the hard-ass he exhibits himself to be. A troubled upbringing pushed him to enlist, and he harbors vulnerabilities that reveal themselves the longer he stays in Rose’s company. Keenly aware of his place in the social hierarchy as a grunt, he is prone to lash out at what he sees as elitist snobbery—but his inferiority complex cannot allow him to self-reflect on how this might lead him and the other enlistees to then redirect their insecurity on innocent women whom they see as occupying an even lowlier position on the totem pole.
At the time of its production and subsequent release, there was some controversy regarding why Rose, after she finds out about the Dogfight, would ever give Birdlace a second chance. This is a fair concern, since most women, especially those as morally upright as Rose, wouldn’t give an asshole like that the time of day to even apologize, but Taylor’s performance provides the key, I think: After the dance, she mopes around her bedroom, listening to favored folk tunes to console herself. The expression on her face contains not only utter sadness and confusion, but loss. She’d had this shining moment, and for it to be exposed as trickery…what she wouldn’t give to have it back again, and for Birdlace’s affection to be true, and not a deception!
Well, it’s how I saw it, anyway. To her credit, she accepts Birdlace’s later apology on the condition that if there’s more of this Dogfight business at play, she’d kill him—and one believes it.
I hesitate to pin the term “love story” on the film because despite the flirtations, and the chemistry between the two, they are not kindred spirits. At the time of their meeting, both are young, inexperienced, and desirous of a firmer place in the world. Rose, however, is a dreamer, and wishes to mature and make an impact in more meaningful ways—through art and social justice—than Birdlace, whose complexity has a certain ceiling, creating in him a longing for Rose because she has those deeper elements to her spirit which he lacks.
The circumstances of the night threw them together, and a few key moments of genuine compassion gave Rose and Birdlace the opportunity to share themselves with each other, however fleetingly—and really, this sort of thing happens between two people more commonly than the idealized tropes of a single, chance encounter breeding Eternal Love, And They Lived Happily Ever After, etc.
As has been commented upon by various reviewers, there is also an exploration of matters like gender performativity, toxic (and the bonds of) masculinity, and the social upheaval of that particular time and place in American history. Civil rights, the eve of Vietnam. Loss of innocence: The Dogfight occurs one night before Kennedy’s assassination. Nothing, however, smacks one on the nose. They come through naturally, through the dialogue of the characters, which is written by someone who has an ear for it—Comfort actually lived through an experience like this, and met someone who he’d come to care for at a Dogfight.
The acting by the two leads is harmoniously excellent: Phoenix is effective as the bloviating all-American jarhead because he was so decidedly not that, and could deliver the performance exactly as it was: an act, crafted to hide the bristling, uncertain boy living inside Birdlace. Taylor is pitch-perfect, more conventionally “cute” than what the script initially asked for, but pulls off the gawky naiveté, and passion, with aplomb. She also delivers a tenderly hesitant vocal on the piano when Birdlace prompts Rose to perform a song for him, and it is one of the highlights of the film. (The soundtrack of the film are selections from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and other folk artists, which are period appropriate and well-chosen in terms of the scenes they appear in.)
Also well-performed are the supporting cast, anchored by the rest of the Four B’s (Richard Panebianco, Anthony Clark, Mitchell Whitfield) and the various women chosen for the Dogfight, who in their relatively short amount of screentime give off the sense of being their own individuals. There is even a small cameo by a young, fresh-faced Brendan Fraser!
The visuals are expectedly workaday but occasionally arresting: I’m thinking of one frame in particular, near the end, when Birdlace is running down the street, away from the camera, and in the background is stretched the Bay Bridge, hazily lit by early dawn.
Another notable moment is when Birdlace and Rose are crossing the street, and they stop, engrossed in argument—the frame then widens to show the two facing each other in the middle of the busy intersection. It’s a nice shot that is also a fun way to visualize not only their standoff, but the chaos of their emotions.
Dogfight’s ending has been criticized for being somewhat tacked-on, and while I confess to feeling similarly, there’s also an appropriateness there. The bulk of the movie has technically been a flashback, so the audience becomes witness to what will happen between Rose and Birdlace after the passage of much time and experience, for the two of them, and for the country as a whole. Was what they shared meant to last, or was it sufficient for only a single night? And what words can be spoken, if no words can account for what’s been lived through; and if, between Rose and Birdlace, nothing else of consequence can be said?
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