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. 

Wanda

WANDA         A-
USA  (102 mi)  1970  d:  Barbara Loden 

She’s trapped and she will never, ever get out of it, and there are millions like her. 
—Barbara Loden in an interview with The New York Times

If you don't want anything you won't have anything, and if you don't have anything, you're nothing. You may as well be dead. You’re not even a citizen of the United States.      

—Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins)               

Released 6-months after Five Easy Pieces (1970), this film flew completely under the radar, as it didn’t and still doesn’t have the same kind of financing, made for a fraction of the budget, without featuring any big name stars, and told in a much more cinematically austere manner.  In fact, this style of film is reverentially slow and ultimately joyless, completely differentiated from what mainstream audiences will ever see, as you’ll have to look to find this one playing in art houses.  The film does seem to have something of a revival after forty years, where filmmaker John Waters included it in his annual selection for the 2012 Maryland Film Festival taking place in Baltimore.  It’s a scathingly lonesome piece of filmmaking written and directed by Barbara Loden, who also stars in the film. While she’s the wife of Elia Kazan, who began as the scantily clad sidekick on The Ernie Kovacs Show who got a pie in her face and was sawed in half, then starred as Warren Beatty’s promiscuous sister in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961), as well as a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe in Kazan's Broadway stage production of After the Fall (1964), written by Monroe’s former husband, Arthur Miller, actually winning the Tony Award for Best Actress, this is the only feature film she ever directed, making two short films several years later, but this is her own project all the way.  Shot on 16 mm and blown up on 35 mm, it’s a blisteringly real film with little to no background information that follows the exploits of Wanda Goronski, having deserted her husband and two children, sleeping instead on her sister’s couch right next to the immense grounds of a Pennsylvania coal mining plant.  These introductory shots of Wanda, all in white, walking across a coal-filled, black industrial landscape is reminiscent of Haskell Wexler following Verna Bloom, the lady in the yellow dress, through the huge crowds and various clashes of demonstrators with police in Medium Cool (1969).  Shot and edited by Nicholas T. Proferes in an innovative, cinéma vérité, slice of life style, this is a peculiarly bleak film, one of the very few American films directed by a woman to be theatrically released at the time, along with Allison Anders, Shirley Clarke, Elaine May, Joan Micklin, and documentarist Barbara Kopple.  

Winner of the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, the film was critically recognized, but barely seen for decades, supposedly inspired by a story Loden read in the newspaper about a woman thanking a judge for sentencing her to twenty years in prison.  It’s an unflinching portrait of a woman with no ambition and low self-esteem, whose very character is personified by no personal drive whatsoever.  Early on, she’s late for a court appearance, showing up with curlers in her hair, seemingly indifferent about the court taking her two children away from her, where she indicates they’re better off with their father.  The rest of the film vindicates the wisdom of that decision, spending her time in bars getting picked up by people she knows nothing about and who definitely want to know nothing about her.  It’s as unflattering a portrait of a woman as you’ll find, yet the film is told in a tender and sympathetic manner, often with long takes, hand-held camerawork, minimal editing, and the gritty authenticity of location shooting, where Wanda barely speaks, but has no harmful intentions, yet she’s routinely taken advantage of, something she’s evidently used to.  After a series of pick ups, she happens to drift into a bar after closing, where the impatience of the bartender is revealed to be a stick up in progress, with the real bartender tied up on the floor behind the bar.  Without realizing the circumstances, seeing it as just another pick up, she tags along with this guy, identified as Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins), who brings her along in his car, which happens to be stolen.  His volatile temper and tyrannical behavior is a contrast to Wanda’s quiet ambivalence, where she’s barely aware of life outside the coal mines.  The film makes an abrupt turn and quickly veers into a road movie, where Wanda realizes the guy she’s hooked up with is a small-time crook, stealing from cars and robbing gas stations along the way.  While he continually berates her and orders her around, she behaves like she’s finally connected to somebody, like this could amount to something.       

The Wanda we see onscreen is the picture of oppression and powerlessness, hardly anyone’s idea of a hero, a quiet and mousy character who never raises her voice, who rarely speaks if not spoken to, and the kind of person who is largely ignored by society.  Coming from the coal belt, she’s uneducated, has no work skills, and is not in a position to change her life on her own.  When guys pick her up, they don’t want to talk to her, just have sex and be done with her afterwards, usually leaving her alone on the side of the road.  For the price of a few beers and maybe a cheap meal, that’s all she gets out of it, certainly not money or love.  Mr. Dennis whisking her out of town for God knows where is probably the biggest adventure in her life and she has no way of knowing how it will play out anymore than she knows where he’s taking her.  Apparently as they were shooting a scene in an open field where Dennis is laying low drinking whisky out of the bottle, some locals were flying their remote controlled model airplanes, where Loden quickly had to integrate the planes into the scene, adding a certain improvised poetry to the moment, as it’s the first suggested expression of freedom or flying away from all her troubles.  One of the more peculiar scenes is Mr. Dennis visiting his own father in a makeshift Tower of Babel, surrounded by Biblical expressions, where the public pays for guided tours through the underground catacombs.  The religious music that plays is rather stunning, as otherwise there’s only the use of natural sound.  The father realizes the path of his son is a road filled with sin and wants no part of him, while Wanda soon finds herself involved in a kidnapping scheme to rob a bank in Scranton.  While her instincts are clearly to have nothing to do with it, as morally she knows it’s wrong, she also doesn’t want Dennis to leave her, so she’ll help him if he needs her, the first spark of something she finally cares about.  As pathetic as it sounds, this is as close to a relationship as she’s likely ever had, even by a guy that robs banks, mentally and physically abuses her, and crudely orders her around.  This uncompromising portrait is not altogether sympathetic, as Wanda seemingly has no free will of her own, yet she’s caught up in a world beyond her control, hopelessly without any means to improve her condition, reminiscent of the exploits of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), a 13-year old child that is already craftier and more educated than Wanda will ever be.  The real heartbreak of this film is that in the half century since the Truffaut film, life hasn’t gotten any better for the Wanda’s in the world, where the freeze-frame at the end reveals how she remains frozen in time. 

Now considered a landmark in American independent filmmaking, what’s unique from this period is the scarcity of American films centered on a working class female character, especially one depicting such a grimy working class milieu.  While the film is a cyclical story of a drifter who leaves her family, has meaningless one-night stands, becomes the hostage of a petty crook, ultimately becoming his mistress and accomplice in crime, only to find herself alone and drifting again at the end, perhaps none the wiser.  Unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, a book where men took to the road as a means of liberation and transcendence from the dull factory jobs and boring routines of working class America in the postwar 40’s and 50’s, the price one had to pay for the American Dream, there is no joy or liberation whatsoever in Wanda’s dour journey.  Rather than feature the exuberance of the road adventure, Loden’s portrait couldn’t be more poignantly understated and relentlessly downbeat.  Designed to counteract the mythical Hollywood portrayal of a romantic outlaw couple on the run, as represented by the hugely successful Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this film undermines any hint of romanticism with a dull and unrelenting passivity from Wanda, a lead character that gets brutally slapped across the face, who has for years become numb to the surrounding world around her.  This unflinching look into an unseen lower stratum of American women who find themselves similarly drifting through life, aimless and alone, is all the more tragically powerful by being told in such an everyday, matter of fact manner.  At the end, standing alone outside a loud and boisterous bar, once again penniless and spiritually void, there’s a peculiar recognition of that sunken, crestfallen look that feels like a holdover from the Depression days, where another woman instinctively seems to understand and invites her inside.  This subtle gesture acknowledges a sisterly kinship for what it means to be alone, on the outside looking in.  According to Bérénice Reynaud For Wanda, from Senses of Cinema, October 2002, a regular contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma magazine since the mid-1980’s, “Wanda's historical importance [is that] Loden wanted to suggest, from the vantage point of her own experience, what it meant to be a damaged, alienated woman – not to fashion a ‘new woman’ or a positive heroine.”