City Slickers Hits Really Different When You Watch It In Your 40s

I was only 8 when the movie City Slickers hit theaters in 1991, so I certainly didn’t see it when it first released. But at some point during adolescence, I watched it... a lot. In fact, I would say this movie (along with its 1994 sequel) played on regular rotation in my household. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the singular reason that I, a person with no useful knowledge about livestock, was convinced I needed a baby cow named Norman in my life. And yet, I hadn’t watched the movie in probably 20 years — until this week, when a casual rewatch made me realize this movie hits way different when you’re around the same age as the main characters.

Honestly, it had been so long since I’d seen the movie that I couldn’t remember specifically what it was that made it a favorite when I was growing up. I just remembered the feeling it gave me: warm and cozy but a little rugged, too, like a Western blanket. I imagine the adventure of it all ensnared me. Going on a cattle drive? Sign me up. Riding a horse through canyons and drinking coffee out of a tin cup? Still on my list. Watching the movie now, though, so many things jumped out that didn’t even occur to me back then.

I was a little surprised at how many mature jokes, innuendo, and asides are embedded in the movie. And, listen, the movie is not perfect — some of the dialogue is definitely a reflection of the casual sexism of the ‘90s. But sexist commentary aside, some of the more adult humor really landed with me during my rewatch, making me laugh out loud. (“That wasn’t flirting; that was polite.” “No, that was, ‘I like your ass, can I wear it as a hat?’”)

What struck me the most about rewatching the movie after a 20+-year hiatus, however, was the fact that City Slickers feels like a coming-of-age film for those of us who now find ourselves in middle age.

A Mid-Life Escape

The movie begins with three middle-aged friends in Pamplona, Spain, during the running of the bulls. Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), and Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) find themselves in varying degrees of existential dread: Mitch feels stuck at his boring radio advertising sales job, Ed struggles dating much younger women to avoid settling down, and Phil wants out of his toxic marriage.

So, for his 39th birthday, Phil and Ed surprise Mitch by booking them on a two-week cattle drive from a ranch in New Mexico to another in Colorado. Mitch’s wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) senses how unhappy and stuck Mitch feels, telling him he needs to go and rediscover himself. The trio set off for the ranch of Clay and Millie Stone, where they meet up with the other out-of-towners who’ll be making the trip with them: entrepreneurial ice cream brothers Ira and Barry, father and son dentists Ben and Steve, and single traveler Bonnie.

Not surprisingly, a lot can go wrong on a cattle drive with a bunch of brand-new vacationing ranch hands, and the group must face everything from untimely deaths to catastrophic weather while still getting the herd to safety.

The Things We Do to Feel Alive

Watching this movie at 41, only a few years older than Mitch, it feels relatable on such a deeper level. When you reach this age, you tend to take stock of your life, re-inventorying it to figure out what your real purpose is. Have you done everything you could have and should have? Are you really living, or just existing? You do things — sometimes reckless, often foolish — to chase the high that comes so naturally with youth. You just want to feel alive again.

City Slickers really captures that complicated matrix of emotions as you age. As Mitch so aptly wonders, “Have you ever had that feeling that this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel, and it ain’t that great?”

Few scenes hit harder than Mitch’s existential crisis and meltdown in front of his son’s class (also, can we talk about little Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny?!). My middle-aged husband could very well have written the 60-second monologue Mitch delivers to the kids: “When you’re a teenager, you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make some money, you think to yourself, ‘What happened to my twenties?’”

While all of this seems like it would ultimately culminate in a movie that would only depress you more, it’s not. It ends up being oddly life-affirming. Hopeful even. There are moments in City Slickers that remind you the kids are going to be alright... and yes, my fellow millennials, we are the kids in this context.

When Ed tries to goad Mitch into saying he’d have an affair if his wife wouldn’t find out, Mitch responds: “It wouldn’t make it alright if Barbara didn’t know; I’d know, and I wouldn’t like myself.”

At the end of the day, we all just want to like ourselves. To grow up to be people that we can be proud of, and our kids — or maybe even the kids we used to be — can be proud of. That doesn’t mean being perfect. It does mean putting in some work to figure out who the best version of you is.

As Curly told Mitch, the secret of life is “just one thing.” What is that thing? “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.” That one thing can look different for different people, but the idea is the same — we have to discover what matters to us most, what makes us feel alive, and center that thing in our lives. For a lot of us, that means pouring ourselves into our relationships or our pursuits.

And the great thing is, we’ve still got plenty of time. (Someone cue up “Young at Heart.”)