River of Grass

RIVER OF GRASS               A-              

USA  (100 mi)  1994  d:  Kelly Reichardt 

Arguably Reichardt’s best film remains her first, easily the most enjoyable work over her entire career, despite the slow and relatively downbeat subject matter, as it’s given a playful and surprisingly blunt style that remains invigorating throughout.  First films are often an indicator of what’s to come, but this is infinitely more amusing than the films to follow, where the jazz soundtrack with occasional drum solos sprinkled throughout pay homage to that subterranean subset of cool music aficionados inhabiting the cozy intimacy of late night, smoke-filled rooms.  While her recent features are far more mannered, intellectually refined, and quietly paced, judiciously taking place somewhere on the fringe of feminist consciousness, where there is historical relevancy to the indicated time periods, this first feature has a more brash and youthful pedigree, where there’s a surprising amount of quirky energy going on where the unique circumstances of dumbstruck and outwardly naïve outlaws-on-the-run definitely adds a bit of flavor, where the painfully underfunded, low-budget production helps to provide a raw and edgy vibe.  Incredibly, despite the accolades that greeted her first film, nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as three Spirit Award nominations in 1994, it was more than a decade before her next feature, where women even now continue to be denied access to the industry, yet ironically, they are plastered across the screens as sexual objects which express an exclusively male point of view.  As a result, she made a few video shorts until fellow indie filmmaker Todd Haynes signed on to produce her next four films, including Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Night Moves (2013).

Ryan Gilbey interview, April 8, 2011, Kelly Reichardt - The Guardian

“The more money you take, the more hands there are in the pie,” she points out. “Right now, there’s no one telling me what to do. I can edit on my own schedule. No one gives me notes outside the same friends who I’ve been showing my films to since I started.” Small wonder she’s so contented when those friends include fellow directors Phil Morrison (Junebug) and Todd Haynes (I’m Not There), who have executive-produced most of her work. She began her film career on the crew of Haynes’s 1991 feature debut, Poison, but he’s an equal rather than a mentor, and has been known to drive her around when she’s scouting locations.

Despite such influential friends, it continues to be a fight for Reichardt to get her movies made. Depressingly, her difficulties have often come down to old-fashioned sexism. “I had 10 years from the mid-1990’s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money. During that time, it was impossible to get anything going, so I just said, ‘Fuck you!’ and did Super 8 shorts instead.” She’s doubtful that the climate has changed much, even after Kathryn Bigelow’s best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker. “I’m outside the industry so I have no idea. But you can watch awards shows or see what’s being made and you still don't see women who have the career of Todd or Gus [Van Sant] or Wes Anderson, or any of those men who make personal films. I teach for a living, and I make movies when I can. I’ve never made money from my films.”

Curiously, Reichardt’s first feature was the inspiration behind the recent Amy Seimetz lovers-on-the-run film Sun Don’t Shine (2012).  While the mismatched lovers weigh down Seimetz’s film, as they couldn’t be less interesting, they are an absolute delight in the original, starring Lisa Bowman as Cozy, a bored, 30-year old housewife still living with her father who dreams of being an acrobatic dancer, the daughter of a jazz musician (Dick Russell) turned detective, whose own mother left home at an early age, feeling surprisingly just as ambivalent, showing little interest in her own children, leaving them home one night, meeting a man named Lee (Larry Fessenden) at a roadside bar, a guy still living with his mother who recently discovered a gun lying on the side of the road, and running off with him.  Together their adventure comprises the entire film.  The unique structure entices from the outset, with a surprisingly candid voiceover from Cozy that provides an air of indifference about the monotonous emptiness in her life, as if she’s just been drifting through the days waiting for that one moment when a switch will suddenly flip on.  The similarity with Sissy Spacek’s character in BADLANDS (1973) is inevitable, as little does she know that another person feeling equally as low and unhappy is living in the neighboring county, where the two are destined to meet.  While this foreshadows an epic encounter where the stars are aligned, nothing could be further from the case.  These two characters are barely there, defined from the start by their social dysfunction, so we never see them actually click together as a couple, rather they seem thrown together by circumstances beyond their control.  Almost at random, numbers occur, like chapter headings, providing apparent order to the meandering nature of the story.  The intimacy of the music adds a special twist, as it feels highly personal, adding a swagger and sensuality missing from these characters who never feel comfortable in their own skin.  By no means does this detract from the viewer’s interest, as it’s their conventionality and sheer ordinariness that feels so appealing, where they’re perfectly relatable, as if we’ve known them all our lives, as there’s a part of us they each seem to possess, like the existential loners from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.   

Set in the stagnant depression of the Florida Everglades, where dilapidated businesses appear on the verge of economic ruin, there’s no sense of hope or advancement, as if we’ve wandered into the same desolate universe as Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), an unflinching portrait of a woman with no ambition and low self-esteem, whose very character is personified by a lack of ambition or personal drive, where there’s not an ounce of artifice anywhere to be found on the screen.  The conscientious aspect of feminist filmmaking shares a similar spirit, as we find ourselves in the company of a woman we have all met many times over, but probably paid little attention to, as there is little about her that stands out.  Throwing two characters together whose lives have never really gotten started is a real challenge, as the combustible energy of their collective lives barely lights a flame.  The brightest color onscreen is expressed by the extreme yellow suit worn by Cozy’s father, who’s struggling with his own woes within the department, as he’s mysteriously lost his police revolver.  This missing item inexplicably ends up in the hands of Lee and Cozy, where in a moment of panic, their comedy of errors begins.  Thinking they’ve shot someone, they immediately go on the run to avoid detection, hanging out in local dive motels, never really venturing far, as the only means of obtaining cash is selling his mother’s record collection.  The dubious nature of their criminal mentality is challenged throughout, as there’s some question whether they’ve even committed a crime, but nothing is more shocking than witnessing Lee loitering around inside a convenience store, where all the pressure of the world is upon him to provide some money to pay their motel bill, where he’s at the psychological precipice of committing a real crime when in a flash someone (looking very much like the director herself) runs in with a gun and grabs the contents of the cash register, leaving him utterly flabbergasted.  The meager nature of their dreams and fantasies are continually undercut by the bleak miserablism of their real lives, yet this effortlessly plays out with such meticulous precision that by the end the imaginary world wonderfully intersects with reality to the point where the viewer and the characters onscreen can’t seem to tell the difference.  In one of the more fascinating realizations, Cozy is stunned by the idea that she might not have actually killed anyone, which leaves her terribly disappointed, as her dream of being an outlaw has suddenly been snatched away, suddenly feeling desperately lost and alone, losing all sense of her remarkably resuscitated self-esteem, where she absurdly thinks if you’re not a murderer, then you’re not really anybody.  She quickly rectifies that, at least in her mind, fueling into the dark swirling themes that define the entire picture, largely fed by pseudo imagery from the sexually empowered female protagonists in Roger Vadim’s …AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1956) and Louis Malle’s VIVA MARIA! (1965), not to mention the many 50’s and 60’s jazz album covers that feature sexually alluring women in provocative poses, where she can be heard muttering under her breath, “Murder is thicker than water.”  Reichardt herself described the movie as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime.”

Sun Don't Shine

SUN DON’T SHINE              B-   
USA  (82 mi)  2012  d:  Amy Seimetz   

Everything about this movie is extremely well-crafted except for the deplorable two lead characters that couldn’t be less interesting, yet they’re onscreen for nearly the entire film, where the sagging weight on their shoulders is more than they or the audience can bear, ultimately sinking an otherwise stellar effort by this first time feature filmmaker.  Seimetz may be better known for her acting role in the recent Shane Carruth film Upstream Color (2013), and prior to that Adam Wingard’s A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE (2010), Lena Dunham’s TINY FURNITURE (2010), and a host of other smallish indie films.  To put it mildly, she is an atrocious director of acting performances, feeling indifferent, allowing performances to drift into self-indulgence, as the two leads here are among the worst ever in an otherwise excellent film.  She apparently directs by not directing, allowing the actors to simply improvise their way through a movie, and the result is awkwardly uncomfortable and purely amateurish.  For all practical purposes, this is a loose remake of Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973), a lovers on the run movie with a mind-altering sound design that is easily the best thing about the film, where one imagines they spent their entire budget on a first rate, Hollywood quality production design, leaving nothing left afterwards, where they likely felt they could manage to figure it out, making a kind of mumblecore horror film.  While Seimetz is the writer, director, editor, and producer on the film, with Shane Carruth as a listed producer in the credits, it shares the same feeling for stylistically proficient but total lack of character in Carruth’s films, while at the same time Seimetz was an associate producer for Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy (2008), which features two highly appealing and incredibly naturalistic lead performances.  So in small indie films, one never knows what to expect, as performances are all over the map, some quite compelling, but not here, where the performances literally ruin the film.     

Something of a schizophrenic film, as clearly this is an experiment gone wrong, where one half is nearly an A while the other half is nearly an F, one would think this might have been noticed before the release, because to screen it in this way feels like a lazily incomplete film, like what we are seeing are the performance outtakes, where one might think they have no professional acting experience, but both have an extensive history working in low budget films in recent years.  Leo (Kentucker Audley) and Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) are the lovers on the run, where their relationship is abusive from the outset, as Leo is overcontrolling, physically hurtful, and psychologically demanding, while Crystal apologizes for every little thing, as she is made to feel like everything is her fault, even getting choked and physically manhandled.  The superb handheld cinematography by Jay Keitel is often stunning, beautifully capturing the mix of Central Florida’s natural beauty and the tawdry kitsch of the commercial tourist industry.  Like being trapped between two worlds, this couple travels in their broken down car which itself barely runs, as it’s literally falling apart, requiring frequent stops to add water to the overheating radiator, doors that need to be opened from the outside, and a trunk that opens only with the aid of a screwdriver.  Their car feels like a trapped character just crying out for help, but remains ignored and unattended throughout, where the bulk of the film is witnessing the disturbing interplay between the two lovers, where Crystal often has a punishing, overly smothering effect with her unending, mindless chatter, evoking the simplistic state of mind of Sissy Spacek in BADLANDS, but taking it to her own level of shallow insecurity, where she is constantly asking for her possessive love to be returned.  Leo, on the other hand, is constantly on the verge of blowing a gasket through utter frustration, angrily blaming Crystal for everything, even as he is the one that never stops making mistakes.  Leo is such a control freak that once he has a thought, he refuses to alter it, even if there’s a better idea.  That’s not in the cards for Leo, who has to live with the consequences of his overly self-absorbed philosophy. 

By the time the film’s secrets are revealed, the first thought that jumps to mind is how many opportunities they have throughout their travels to solve their problems earlier and make things easier on themselves, as they are often seen traveling in remote and isolated spots, but these two crackpots would rather make things as difficult as possible, where each slowly unravels before our eyes, becoming a darker and more noirish film, though it occurs almost exclusively in the oppressively bright sunshine, where tourists rarely feel so annoyingly intrusive, becoming an instrument of a deteriorating state of mind.  Unfortunately, these aren’t the actors to express this mental fissure as they simply don’t have the range.  The result is one can appreciate the visual expression and an utterly enthralling sound design, which combine to establish a murky atmosphere of fear, dread, and approaching danger, where the details of their lives slowly emerge into an approaching catastrophe of enveloping horror.  Much of it set in the director’s home town of St. Petersburg, Florida, the overall atmosphere is poisoned by a toxic stench of suffocating paranoia and distrust, growing more disturbing until their lives are completely contaminated.  While the atmosphere is drenched with complexity, these two nitwits don’t have an ounce of brains or mystery between them, existing only on a superficial periphery, where they are the vast internal wasteland of disorientation and human dysfunction, of little consequence to the overall outcome, as so little sympathy is ever generated toward either one.  This odd imbalance of such insipidly ill-matched characters caught up in such an eerily seductive, yet rotting atmosphere does resemble Barbara Loden’s remarkable Wanda (1970), an unflattering portrait of another woman with such low self-esteem and no ambition, but in Loden’s film, her very existence was a revelation to cinema.  Half a century later, perhaps Seimetz is suggesting we haven’t made much progress. 

Upstream Color

UPSTREAM COLOR        C+                       

USA  (96 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Shane Carruth

Despite all the hoopla about this film, and more particularly the filmmaker, this is not a marked improvement over his earlier film PRIMER (2004), one of the low budget marvels of the last decade.  Waiting 9-years to make his eagerly awaited second film, there is a cult audience clamoring for something implicitly deep and complex from this film, perhaps another sci-fi puzzle film, but they won’t find it.  Instead it’s simply an obscure, largely experimental piece that attempts to be more than it is, as whatever narrative there is remains obfuscated by a sketchy design that remains elusive at best.  The problem is whatever themes or subject matter he is attempting to explore just never rise to the level of interest, as characters nearly sleepwalk through their roles, never generating any relevant dramatic connection.  Before he was a film director, Carruth was a math major, becoming a computer programmer developing flight simulating software.  As his two films suggest, guys heavily into science don’t always make the best communicators.  In fact, one might think there is a pervading style of filmmaking where at least part of what it’s about is the difficulty in communicating, for instance teen angst films, or Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), where he takes the hesitant and inarcticulate nature of a young cowboy to an artform, or the many variations of supposedly naturalistic dialogue from low-budget Duplass brothers or Andrew Bujalski mumblecore movies, a fringe movement about post-college or early adult white people with problems that never really connected with mainstream audiences, as they’re not really about much of anything.  Damned if that doesn’t plague this picture as well, where its intentional ambiguity remains a puzzle not worth exploring.  Even if there is a coherent story here, the question is what difference does it make?  How does a film like this have any relevance in our lives?  Wanting this to be about something, like say the enveloping fear and paranoia of THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), is not the same as making a profoundly affecting film, where the underlying focus sticks with you for days and weeks afterwards, perhaps even a lifetime.  Interest in this film fades quickly.

As best as one can determine, there are two opposing wavelengths occurring here, where one is a high degree of sensitivity and thought, where you’re able to sense things others don’t see or hear, almost like an autistic sensory level, where one’s capacity to reflect upon altered states of existence, or a unique “otherness,” may be completely mystifying to some, but certainly early on we see many gathered together, including at various times both Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth) drinking what is believed to be a special (parasite infected) purified water, something to help achieve a state of wellness, where one hopes to feel better than at any other point in one’s life.  The downside is the sacrifice or price paid to achieve this sense of heightened elevation, real or imagined, where you have no memory of what happened and leave yourself open to unscrupulous operators, achieving a near hypnotic state like a cult brainwashing effect where people can take advantage of your vulnerability and steal all your money, leaving you paranoid and in fear, but also angry and demoralized by the entire process afterwards.  But at least initially you want to believe, like the strange Russian sci-fi film Target (Mishen) (2011) that promises everlasting youth, only to ask yourself later, but at what price?  Unknown to each other at the outset, Kris and Jeff are mysteriously drawn to one another, perhaps unknowing why, though Kris is so incommunicative and unapproachable that one has to wonder what’s the attraction?  She wears an enormous large-sized headset at all times in public, listening to who knows what, but obviously to keep other people away.  Nonetheless Jeff persists, as if by supernatural calling, where he believes they are drawn to one another, perhaps to help one another understand what they’ve mutually forgotten, helping each other piece together missing memories, even though they barely talk.  This leads to an intimate relationship, as if by osmosis, where it’s certainly not their unbelievably poor communication skills, where they talk over each other’s words and ignore one another with regularity.  What changes is Kris gets pregnant, or at least thinks she does, as her conscious existence is seemingly tracked by the parasite she swallowed, which ends up at a pig farm.  It’s actually Kris’s pig that gets pregnant, unbeknownst to her, where Kris grows irate when they take the little piglets away. 

There is no explanation for this transference of human consciousness, which goes through yet a third life cycle when the pig farmer wraps several chosen pigs in a sack and drowns them in the river, where the parasite passes through their bodies in a bluish fluid that is released upstream causing exotic orchids to grow.  From these orchids is extracted the original parasite that begins this strange life cycle all over again.  What is certainly bizarre is the state of inexplicable anger mixed with utter indifference by the humans used as guinea pigs, where they do not seem to be in control of their own human faculties, still affected long after the parasites have left their own bodies.  Now if aliens had passed through these bodies, like the high powered, heavy metal infused THE HIDDEN (1987), an over the top, sci-fi story that packs a punch, then you’ve got something to generate interest for decades to come.  But in this dreamy saga of lost souls, roaming the earth in a state of listless apathy, where the true meaning of their lives is apparently stolen by a series of unscrupulous business transactions which happens to block the ethereal wavelengths.  When Kris takes to swimming, spouting gibberish poolside as she dives for stones on the bottom of the pool, Jeff is able to decipher her apparent mad ramblings as quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, of all things, a springboard to freedom if ever there was such a thing.  If it wasn’t so goofy, it might actually be entertaining, but it’s not, as the entire film is cast in such a darkly somber mood, as if the whole thing was the invention of rabid conspiracy theorists who see the end of the world near through genetic mutation.  Damn the scientists and mega corporations for spreading toxic poisons throughout the world altering the face of humanity.  The best thing in the film is easily the atmospheric score written by Carruth, who writes, directs, edits, acts, composes the music, and self produces his own film, an ambitious compilation of responsibilities for what is ultimately a dreadfully impersonal, drearily sad reflection of the human condition in the modern age, where swindlers and snake oil salesmen, aka the capitalist conglomerate enterprises maintain a greedy, monopolistic control over an easily hoodwinked populace looking for a quick and easy fix.  The idea of violating the natural order of things is nothing new, hardly revelatory, and never digs deep enough to matter.  Not sure what the characters are listening to on their giant headsets, apparently tuning out the rest of the world, and the audience with them.