There’s a beguiling simplicity to Kelly Reichardt’s films. This is no better exemplified than in her second feature length film, Old Joy (2006), which uses a story by Jon Raymond as its foundation. Essentially a two hander, the film feels like a sort of benign voyeurism in casting a detached, observational eye on a meeting of old friends. For Reichardt and her cinematographer Peter Sillen, nuance is especially important. Together they evoke the deceptively simple machinations of this fractured friendship through passive glances and demonstrative silences.
A significant time has passed since Mark (Daniel London) has seen Kurt (Will Oldham). In the meantime, their lives in Portland, Oregon have taken divergent paths. Mark has gainful employment and a pregnant wife. On the other hand Kurt is a drifter trapped in a stasis, clinging to past ways and reconstituted memories of the way things used to be genuine and sweet in the way of all reminiscences, but unable to take into account the minute alterations that re-shape us in time.
Kurt rings out of the blue with a suggestion that they use a single night camping trip to catch up. Though a little reluctant Mark agrees, and they head off in search of a place to set up for the night before trekking to a nearby hot springs in the morning.
For Kurt, imagining that their old connection can be recreated feels increasingly foolish, the yearning of a child, yet both men construct a façade a place to deposit shared happy memories. Whilst Kurt expresses awe at the lack of fear in Mark’s pondering of impending fatherhood Mark must be silently wondering is it tenacity or stupidity that keeps Kurt circling his old haunts?
They touch old bases but there is nothing elaborate in their ruse for we feel it too an uncomfortable presentiment of this day perhaps being their last together. It begins to permeate their stilted conversations, their idle silences; a wedge, in an almost physical sense, seems to situate itself between them.
In an impassioned moment of clarity, Kurt puts his finger on it, admitting “there’s something between us” that is preventing them from being real friends again.
Mark, it becomes obvious, is representative of man’s natural progression through life, acquiring debts, a family, ambitions, whilst Kurt is emblematic of our disheartening propensity to retreat and relapse. A man-child whom time has almost forgotten, he’s still nurtured by the convenient comfort of recreational drugs or content to cling to abstractions like his insistence on perceiving the universe in the shape of a tear forever dropping through space.
There’s a calmness about Reichardt’s view of the world that elicits both pleasure and sorrow in equal measure. Pleasure in what is derived from a universal melancholia blanketing lives built upon comforting memories, all expired but none forgotten. But it’s the sorrow that lingers longest here and everywhere that furtive and decisive emotion, best described to Kurt by a stranger in a dream as “nothing but worn-out joy.”
Reichardt’s wonderful film is a quiet, stealthy revelation: minimalist in the extreme yet shot through with bittersweet reflections on life’s mysterious passage, on the ties that time cannot sever but leaves vulnerable to the process of painful erosion.
I say:
The antithesis of studio film making, Reichardt’s tiny gem embodies the true spirit of indie film making.
See it for:
Reichardt’s soulful approach to the material and a couple of understated, nuanced performances.
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