Animals (And The Tollkeeper) on AllMovie

Michael Di Jiacomo made his directorial debut with this allegory that opens with a 12-minute black-and-white prologue about three French filmmakers who encounter the tuba-playing Tollkeeper (Mickey Rooney) on a silent stretch between two ghost towns in the Utah desert. In NYC, an armed thief (John Turturro) holds up despairing cabdriver Henry (Tim Roth), who tells him to go ahead and pull the trigger. With the thief gone, Henry's next passengers are the three Frenchmen seen earlier, and he takes them into New England where he's so spellbound by the beautiful Fatima (Mili Avital) that he takes a job with her irritating mother in order to maintain his pursuit of Fatima. Shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.