CERTAIN WOMEN - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 8

Kelly Riechardt (NIGHT MOVES) returns to the London Film Festival with this hauntingly melancholy portmanteau film.  The film tells the story of three different women who have achieved a degree of material success in their lives, and contrasts this with the people who have been left by the wayside.  In each story, the women are living lives that are defined by a failure to communicate, and a lack of self-awareness regarding this failure. They are trapped in their success, unknowing, uncaring. 

In the first story Laura Dern plays a small-town lawyer annoyed by a client who just won't believe when her when she tells him he has no case.  She is frustrated by what she perceives to be his misogyny in refusing to hear bad news from a female lawyer. But the reality is that he is actually very distraught at the loss of his livelihood and desperately lonely.   Jared Harris (MAD MEN) gives a very moving performance as a man on the edge and Dern convinces as the lawyer who sees his breakdown as an inconvenience rather than a cause for empathy.  I also love how Reichardt keeps the final interpretation of whether she has gained empathy open at the end of the film.

NIGHT MOVES - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

As some of you may remember, this blog used to be called Movie Reviews for Greedy Capitalist Bastards, because I am one, and I have no truck with pretentious nonsense, vegetarians, and hippies.  So Kelly Reichardt's new flick NIGHT MOVES, fell right into my lap!  It shows you how do-gooding radical lefties can be as self-serving and arbitrarily violent as they would have usgreedy  capitalists be.  It's just that we own it!

So, in this movie three radical tree huggers decide to blow up a damn because this is going to supposedly disrupt the water supply and teach us ipad users a lesson or two.  The first hour of the flick basically plays as an anarchist revolutionary's handbook and I could definitely have done with a faster pace and more thrilling tense feel. It's always the way.  Indie directors think they can do genre, but genre movies are hard, and shouldn't be condescend to.  Making a taught thriller is not easy. 

Reichardt is on safer ground in the second half of the film where he can do his trademark interior exploration of psychology and mood.  Once the deed is done we see problems open up.  The preppie girl, Dena (Dakota Fanning) starts to feel guilty and blab.  Peter Sardgaard's Harmon becomes all too predictably, the manipulative sinister voice on the end of a phone.  That leaves us with the real  emotional and psychological heart of the film: Jesse Eisenberg's Josh.  His performance is so nuanced and moving in the final twenty minutes of the film that it elevates a rather second rate thriller into something altogether finer.   

NIGHT MOVES has a running time of 112 minutes.  NIGHT MOVES played Venice Toronto and London 2013. It will be released in France on March 5th 2014.

London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 7 - MEEK'S CUTOFF

Meek's Cutoff is a real-life trail in Oregon, originally followed by Stephen Meek in 1845. He led a group of pioneers down that route, losing many to dehydration, but eventually helped open up Western Oregon with his trail. In director Kelly Reichardt's (WENDY AND LUCY) movie the story is stripped down and pared back. Rather than hundreds of pioneers we have three families, and rather than epic confrontations with Native Americans we have a single dramatic relationship. Lost, desperate for water, the pioneers capture a lone Native American, and force him to lead them to water. This confrontation brings out the worst prejudices of Meek, and the paranoia of some of the women who have been brought up on vicious tales. But it also brings out the essential decency and courage of Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) - the moral and emotional heart of the tale. The ultimate idea of the movie is subversive. The trail is named after Stephen Meek, and the pioneers are much to be admired, but as the movie progresses the captive becomes captor. He is still bound up by the pioneers, but they are completely dependent on him to find water and to survive.

I find Kelly Reichardt's films alienating. I find the stillness, the quietude, disturbing and, ultimately, dull. I admire the beautiful cinematography and the acting - but it's a kind of abstract admiration. I suspect that audiences will either love this film - for its visuals and its central idea - or hate it - for its silence, and its oblique ending. I am glad I watched it, even if I didn't really enjoy it. I admire the project, if not the product.

MEEK'S CUTOFF played Venice and Toronto 2010. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

Call me a heartless bastard but I was bored witless by WENDY AND LUCY

Wendy is a young woman with no history and a family that is indifferent toward her. In addition, she has a clapped-out car, a dog called Lucy, a kind soul, and precisely enough money to get her to seasonal work in Alaska. This film comprises eighty minutes of masochistic liberal angst, in which Wendy's car breaks down, she can't afford the repairs, she gets arrested for shoplifting, and loses her dog in the process. Evidently, we're meant to feel desperately sorry for Wendy. She's one step away from homelessness and the system doesn't so much oppress her as just not give a shit. And this film wants us to empathise so badly, it hits us over the head with just how pathetic Wendy is. Feel its earnestness in the pure realism of Kelly Reichardt's direction! Feel it's aching heart in Michelle Williams' uglied-up haircut and tragic face! Be manipulated by the scene in which Wendy has to give up her pet dog Lucy!

WENDY AND LUCY is a masochistic, manipulative, one-note film. Over-hyped and by far not as profound as it thinks it is.

OLD JOY played Cannes, Toronto and London 2008 and was released in the US last year. It was released earlier this year in Croatia and is currently on release in the UK. It opens on Australia on March 26th in Australia; and on April 8th in France.

OLD JOY - great concept but a little trying

As a cinephile I feel I should really love perverse little films like OLD JOY, but while I admire its perversity, the high-art concept tried my patience.

It opens with Daniel London's character Mark having a terse conversation with his wife. An old friend has been in touch wanting to go on a camping trip. The wife is clearly not happy but Mark sets off. Will Oldham plays the friend, Kurt. They two may once have been close but now Kurt a bearded drifter who rambles on about nothing in particular. So follows an 70 minute lament for friends who no longer have anything in common. Old joys have turned to sorrow.

The evocative sound track is by Yo La Tengo. The sound design captures every bird-song and insect chirrup. The Super 16 photography beautifully captures the lush Oregon forest. Caterpillars crawling along grass and leaves reflected in water are shown in loving close-ups. Whole swathes of the movie are long, patient tracking shots of the protagonists driving or hiking. For those who look for it there is an interesting homo-erotic sub-text. The central performances are well done. But my god is it dull.

OLD JOY was released in the UK in January 2007 and opens in France next week. It is available on DVD.