How Bronlonius Got his 'Nads Back

Ode To A Panned 2009 Sci-Fi Comedy

Gentlemen Broncos (2009) is an absurdist comedy directed by Jared Hess, about a teenage boy, Benjamin Purvis (played by Michael Angarano), who lives in a spherical home with his neurotic widow mother, Judith (played by Jennifer Coolidge, of White Lotus fame). Ben’s hobby is writing pulp sci-fi novels, the most recent, “Yeast Lords”, he secretly hopes to publish. 

Ben’s mother Judith is his biggest fan, clipping stories about his professional idol, an inexplicably famous writer named “Dr.” Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), who passes off bat-shit crazy plot-lines for novels with names like Moon Fetus. “A fetus is found on a moon base. That’s the premise,” he tells his agent, who hangs up on him.

Judith also sends Ben to a fantasy writers’ camp called “Cletusfest” (an obscure reference to “hillbillies”), which resembles a 1970s Star Trek convention-meets-Harlequin-Romance-readout, held in a high school auditorium.  Arriving at the bus stop, Judith asks the camp counselor how much money her son will need for the 2-day festival --" is 4 dollars enough?, she asks.

The driver responds, geekily -- “I don’t know, um — maybe 40?,” to which, Coolidge delivers her patented plaintive whine-- “ohh…really??”  (I must say I have greater appreciation for Coolidge’s repetitive comedic talents after watching this movie).

***

Gentlemen Broncos is full of awkward, ambivalent interactions between the ultra-sincere Ben, whose obvious, fidgety anxiety is progressively aggravated by his disbelief and discomfort before turning into outright disgust at the lack of respect for boundaries exhibited by everyone around him — including his well-meaning mother (though — spoiler alert — she swoops in to save the day at the end). Most of his ‘friends’ acknowledge his (relatively) significant talent by trying to steal his work.

One of the first Ben befriends at Cletus Fest is Tabatha (Halley Feiffer), whose creative ‘genre’ is soft porn. Tabatha has an ambiguous relationship with plastic-faced teen producer named Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez), but clearly has an eye on Ben. In her first interaction with Ben, she gets money from him to buy potato chips, on the pretext that she needs tampons - but only has Belgian Francs, having just returned from a year abroad.

The Power of the Suffix:

In one particularly memorable scene, Chevalier delivers a tutorial to the camp-goers on the “The Power of the Suffix,” in which he advances the theory that the biggest symptom of bad writing is poor choice of protagonist (“protags”, as he calls them) names -- and then proceeds to explain how endings like “Onious, Ainus, and Anous” will turn any name into gold:

“For example,” he says, “you can take a humdrum, forgettable name like Nebuchadnezzar, and turn it into something magical...like this .. Nebucoronius.. And, it’s that easy….”

In the same amazing scene, Chevalier proceeds to lecture a teenage girl why she absolutely cannot name a troll character in her novel “Teacup”:

“I don’t like it,” he says.

“I’m an author picturing myself as a troll mother,” Chevailier tells the girl. I have just given birth to a litter of troll cubs. They’re covered in placentae, pawing at my many teats for the vital life-giving colostrum…  I’m not thinking, hmm, Teacup?  -- Am I?  It’s just not believable,” Chevalier intones nasally, as he points at the word written in caps on the blackboard.  If I don’t believe it the reader doesn’t believe it… Trajanus….Traka Khan…. Trody… names in this vein.”

While acting as Lonnie’s fawning production assistant, Tabatha tries to seduce Ben and gets him to let her read Yeast Lords, whose plot and imagery are even more outlandish than Chevalier’s productions, but the viewer recognizes as somehow in a different league, something like “atrociously brilliant.”

Thanks to Tabatha, we understand that Yeast Lords is actually a tribute to Ben’s deceased father, a “former game warden and adventurer” whom Ben projects in the novel as a savior of the galaxy, fighting off alien villains after his “‘nads” - his testicles-- which, after capturing him, they surgically remove and put in jars, for use in producing a master race.

Tabatha, while presented as an opportunistic ditz, has an epiphany herself, when she says to Ben: “I see, so Bronco is kind of like your dad, and his gonads are his seed, and that’s why they’re so precious.”  

In Ben’s imagined ideal movie rendition of Yeast Lords, Bronco (Sam Rockwell), manages to escape, and is seen sitting on a beach, trying to sew back his missing testicle, retrieved from a mason jar he grabs on the way out of his captor Daisius’ operating theatre — with a needle and thread.

Picking Yeast Lords out of a pile of crappy teen manuscripts submitted for the Cletus Fest literary prize, Chevalier sees a possible solution to his creative block, and steals the story, tweaking certain details, while muttering “forgive me,” perhaps in penance.

The movie continues to integrate bits of three separate film productions of Ben’s movie -- the one as imagined by Ben, the one ultimately produced by Chevalier,  and the clearly terrible movie made by Lonnie and Tabatha— as well as a laughable sex fantasy in which Tabatha cons Ben into acting with her, on the premise that it will speed up production of Yeast Lords.

These movies within movies are in themselves brilliant, each chronicling a different aspect of Bronco (aka Brutus)’ search to destroy the yeast lords and retrieve his missing testicle.

Sam Rockwell is versatile and off his rocker as “Bronco” (or, in Chevalier’s version of the tale, the ostentatiously gay “Brutus” in a pink dress), scanning the yeast factory with retro binoculars for its “Achilles heel,” apparently with his dog Ballzak in tow (Ballzak never makes an obvious appearance, but is par of a million references to “balls” throughout the movie).  This particular clip is floating around TikTok (and presumably found me for a reason).

When Brutus’ suckling sister’s imbecilic brother finds traces of yeast in a cow patty, Brutus nibbles on the chocolate cookie-like disc, realizing that its yeast content, while “certainly not concentrated,” may be sufficient. For what? We soon find out. To jump up several meters in jerky motions as if dangling by a crane. We can infer that on whatever world Bronco, a.k.a. Brutus lives, yeast bestows superpowers.

***

At its heart, Gentlemen Broncos is coming-of-age movie, a horror story, and a piece of absurdist theater, with almost every scene a visual, period-piece feast.  There’s endless scatological humor -- with crap and bile and vomit coming out of every possible orifice, and animal  --but it nicely complements the movie’s obsession with gonads and sexless procreation. The underlying message, I think, is that “life itself is absurd.” 

It’s somehow tragically fitting (and also funny) that the movie was absolutely panned, by reviewers who seemed unable to see the care and the art that went into creating the dialogue and sequences.  A cranky New York Times reviewer called the movie a juvenile, scatological “misfire”. In stark contrast,  The Guardian, under an apologetic title (presumably not written by the author) compares it some of the best of British humor, with which, indeed, it has a lot in common (the movie reminded me of Monty Python sketches like “How Not to be Seen.” The New Yorker was an odd and belated champion of Gentlemen Broncos, writing in 2018 that the movie is "a truly great film, with no asterisk whatsoever.”

Indeed,  This is no ‘mere stupid movie,’ it’s a great stupid movie.

If I try to think of similar movies, I think of the 2020 Will Farrell film Eurovision, about an unknown Icelandic singing duo who gets a chance to participate in the famous Eurovision contest after their competition is blown up in a freak yacht accident. Also panned, but, in my opinion, comic genius. Stylistically, Gentlemen Broncos shares lots with Wes Anderson’s interesting but less good 2023 Asteroid City, while manifesting in the inverse of Mel Brooks’ The Producers — about a group of businessmen who hope to profit from bankruptcy proceedings by setting out to make the worst play possible, only to find that audiences take bad acting as brilliant satire.

I don’t claim to have gotten every single reference in the movie, but the puzzling element, aside from the missing Ballzak, is the meaning of the title, Gentlemen Broncos. Perhaps, Fox, the movie’s distributor (accused by The Guardian of gross negligence for pulling the movie quickly from theaters after an initial set of unfavorable reviews) could have learned a lesson from Chevalier the Suffix King, and renamed the movie “How Bronlonius Got His ‘Nads Back.”

Tabatha delivers the best, nearly-straight line of the movie, counseling Ben: “Like all authors you’re going to have to go through a lot of crap… But someday your junk will be seen by all, and it will be awesome. I truly believe that.”

For the official movie preview click here.

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