Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

Will Oldham and Daniel London in Old Joy

Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith, Robin Rosenberg, Keri Moran, Autumn Campbell, Steve Doughton, Matt McCormick, Darren Prolsen, Jillian Wiseneck. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt. Cinematography: Peter Sillen. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Yo La Tengo. 

After watching Old Joy, I went to IMDb to check if I had ever seen Daniel London or Will Oldham in anything else. Turns out, I probably have: Both have done several movies and a lot of TV, but never anything else that forces them to hold the screen the way they do in Kelly Reichardt's film. Often, the very unfamiliarity of the "stars" of a movie is its greatest strength, allowing you to see the characters they play unfiltered through a previously established persona. No matter how effectively someone like Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis may transform themselves from film to film, you're still watching them act rather than be a character; you're conscious to some degree of what they've done before. The freshness of Old Joy lies in getting to know Mark (London) and Kurt (Oldham), to work out their backstories and speculate about their motives. If Mark and Kurt had been played by, let's say, Jake Gyllenhaal and Seth Rogen, we'd have different responses to the characters than we do. Old Joy is a movie without a plot: Mark gets a call from his old friend, Kurt, who wants to take him to a hot springs he has discovered in the Oregon backwoods. Mark feels obligated to check with his pregnant wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), before setting out on this weekend adventure -- the slight tension in their conversation hints that Tanya doesn't quite trust Kurt, and that maybe Mark would be happy with an excuse not to go. But the two men, accompanied by Mark's dog, Lucy (played by Reichardt's own dog, Lucy, the "co-star" of her 2008 film Wendy and Lucy), set out for the weekend. They get lost on the way to the springs and spend the night camping out in a sort of dumping ground on a back road, but get their bearings in the morning and hike to their destination, an isolated spring in the middle of the forest with no one else around. Mark soaks blissfully in his hot tub, but Kurt is more unsettled, getting out to smoke some weed and to give Mark a shoulder rub. Then they return to the city, where at the end we see Kurt wandering restlessly at night. There are no feral mountain men to threaten the two, as in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and no animal predators menace them -- any such tensions we supply from our own imaginations. What we are left with is a portrait of an aging, fraying friendship of two men who have gone different ways in their lives, so that at midlife Mark is settled and relatively prosperous (he drives a Volvo, that token vehicle of the middle class urban liberal), whereas Kurt is still feckless, rootless, and maybe intensely frustrated -- there are some hints that Kurt is sexually attracted to Mark. The past weighs on both of them: The film's title comes from a line spoken by Kurt, "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy." It's a film to be savored, to be recalled in the hours after you've watched it. 

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Will Patton, John Robinson, Ayanna Berkshire, Larry Fessenden. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt, based on a story by Jonathan Raymond. Cinematography: Sam Levy. Production design: Ryan Warren Smith. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Smokey Hormel, Will Oldham.

"People who can't afford dog food shouldn't have dogs," says the store clerk who has just nabbed Wendy for shoplifting a can of dog food for Lucy, who is tied up outside the store. The clerk is an insufferable young ass, sucking up to his boss, who from the look on his face is somewhat inclined to let Wendy pay for the dog food and go. But under the assault of smarmy platitudes from the clerk, he calls the police instead. Hours later, Wendy is set free and returns to the store to find Lucy gone. And so the central plot of the film, which recalls the search for the stolen bike in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), is set in motion. But to go back to the store clerk's remark, it's worth considering at face value: Lucy is in fact a luxury for someone as impoverished as Wendy, whose devotion to the dog complicates an already desperate existence. Lucy is by no means as essential to Wendy's survival as the bicycle is to Antonio's in the De Sica classic. Wendy is a dreamer, who thinks that she'll find gainful work in Alaska, and has set out from Indiana in her aging Honda Accord, with only a few hundred dollars, some meager possessions, and her beloved Lucy. But when the Honda breaks down in Oregon (the city is unnamed but the film was made in Portland), achieving that dream becomes infinitely more difficult. At the end, Wendy has neither car nor dog, but she persists, hopping a freight that may take her to her dream destination -- or not. It's a fable of hope and folly that leaves us to ponder the unknown, which is this small film's great strength. Like Bicycle Thieves, it makes a social comment about the need for safety nets and about the Catch-22s that plague the lives of the poor. The security guard who befriends Wendy, an old man who works 8-to-8 standing outside a strip mall to keep people from sleeping in their cars in the parking lot, observes that you can't get a job without an address, and you can't get an address without a job that allows you to pay for an address. But mostly it's a story about how dreams keep people going while also forcing them to pay the price for dreaming and not succumbing to despair. Michelle Williams is, as always, a marvel, a chameleon actress who seemingly can play anything.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson, Rod Rondeaux. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond. Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt. Production design: David Doernberg. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Jeff Grace.

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff leaves its viewers in the dark in more ways than one. The night scenes are illuminated only by what would have been available to the members of the wagon train making its slow way west: lanterns, firelight, and moonlight. And in the end, we are not allowed conventional movie closure: the survival or demise of the characters, or even whether they made the choice to follow the lead of Meek or of the Indian who has been pressed into service as a guide. Reichardt has flouted so many conventions of the genre that, depending on your willingness to take the film on its own terms, it can be (and has been) described as either gripping or frustrating. She eschews the tendency to turn the American West into a panorama of wide open spaces, instead cramming everything into the old-fashioned Academy ratio for screen framing. She undercuts heroism by never letting us know whether the ostensible hero of the film, Michelle Williams's Emily Tetherow, is right or wrong in her decision to defend the Indian guide against the racist Meek (Bruce Greenwood, hidden behind lots of hair and beard). What we have most of in the film is a sense of being lost, not only physically, in the desert wilds of the far West, but also spiritually, of being cut off from the God the devout members implore so fervently. The isolation is terrifying, especially when the one person who knows the land in which they're wandering doesn't speak their language. We are betrayed by our hope for conventional movie resolutions, and that only makes us feel cut off too.

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone in Certain Women

Laura: Laura Dern
Gina: Michelle Williams
The Rancher: Lily Gladstone
Elizabeth Travis: Kristen Stewart
Ryan: James Le Gros
Fuller: Jared Harris
Sheriff Rowles: John Getz
Guthrie: Sara Rodier
Albert: Rene Auberjonois

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Screenplay: Kelly Reichardt
Adapted from stories by Maile Meloy
Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt
Production design: Anthony Gasparro
Film editing: Kelly Reichardt
Music: Jeff Grace

I haven't seen any other films by Kelly Reichardt and I haven't read the stories by Maile Meloy on which Reichardt based her film Certain Women, but it's clear to me that Reichardt has a sure hand with the essence of the contemporary short story: the pregnant slice of life that comes to no definitive conclusion within its confines, but reverberates long after you've read it. One touch struck me almost immediately: When we first meet Laura, the central character in the first third of the film, she is getting out of bed after a mid-day liaison with a man. We don't see him again until the second third of the film, when he turns up again as the husband of another woman, Gina. But Reichardt leaves this fact undeveloped: It's there as something to be contemplated as we watch the sections of the film that deal respectively with Laura and Gina. The two women never meet in the film, and if Ryan's infidelity has any effect on his marriage, it's only as backstory to the tensions that surface between Ryan and Gina when we see them together. This is a film in which nothing is ever really resolved: Laura's client, Fuller, goes a little mad and she has to talk him out of a hostage-taking situation, so he goes to jail and at the end of the film she brings him a vanilla milkshake and listens as he tells how his wife left him. Gina and Ryan are building a house and their sullen teenage daughter sulks in the car as Gina bargains with an old man for some sandstone blocks in his yard. The old man's mind wanders while she talks, and he seems to address all of his remarks to Ryan, when Gina usually handles business matters. Later, when they're loading the sandstone onto a truck, Gina waves to the old man as he stands in his window, but he doesn't respond. And in the most poignant section of the film, a young woman who tends to the horses on a ranch wanders into a night class taught by Elizabeth, a stressed-out young lawyer, and develops a crush on her. She returns to the class and takes Elizabeth to a diner several times until the night when a new instructor appears and tells them that the long drive Elizabeth has been making to teach the class has gotten too much for her. The young woman then takes the four-hour drive to the town where Elizabeth (as well as Laura and Gina) lives, seeks her out, and bids an awkward goodbye. Then she gets into her truck and drives back, falling asleep at the wheel but fortunately only running off the road into a field. The sequences meld into one another without breaks, and the whole thing is permeated by a sense of place: the beauty, loneliness, and subtle menace of the Montana landscape.