![]() ![]() Arlene Iverson ( Janet Ward) is a onetime B-movie sweater girl who married a couple of rich guys - one dead, the other ex - and must be lonely, because she greets Harry dressed as if she's hired him to look at her breasts. In Josh's face, however, we find little insight and too many blank stares.As the movie opens, he is summoned to the kind of client who would be completely at home in a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe story. The more Josh and the film retreat from the group, the more it asks pivotal questions about ethics, about how exactly one ought to fight for a more hospitable world, both politically and environmentally. But in the film's final third, the inscrutability feels more like a miscalculation through overcompensation: In its aim to tamp down Eisenberg's neuroticism and have him offer slow drips of revelation rather than bursts of loquacious energy, Night Moves keeps too much hidden from view. This impenetrability perhaps is meant to position Josh as a lost soul fighting for a lost planet. Each is left alone with their own consciences, their own moral compasses, and the audience is increasingly left alone with Josh, whose suspicious, gloomy expression hardly changes throughout and who, to the end, remains unknowable. After carrying out their plot, Josh, Dena and Harmon, never particularly united in the first place, separate. The reason, largely, is Josh, the least personable character that Reichardt and Raymond have ever crafted, particularly as played by a taciturn Eisenberg. But having watched Night Moves twice now - the first time when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year - it remains her only film that has left me cold, even as I can't seem to quite shake it. ![]() Reichardt is one of the most talented, thoughtful American directors working today. "Who says?" he asks, and then scoffs at her reply: "Yeah, well, maybe science is wrong." So much is clear when Harmon reacts strongly to Dena's doomsday facts about the world's declining fish population. Night Moves doesn't doubt the basic rationale behind the trio's activism (this isn't a surreptitious case against environmentalism), but it's clearly skeptical about this particular cast of characters, whose motives turn out to diverge significantly or, in Josh's case, be nearly impossible to discern. That's true both literally - we watch many parts of their plan unfold through long shots, with unaware bystanders appearing in the foreground increasingly as the event nears - and morally. Reichardt, working with her regular screenwriting partner Jonathan Raymond, keeps us at a distance from the trio. It's all very quiet, very still, a standard mood for Reichardt that in this case slowly turns to dread as Dena, Josh and a third partner in crime, Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), set in motion a plan to load Josh and Dena's boat with explosives and blow up a nearby dam in an act of consciousness-raising eco-terrorism. Reichardt keenly observes these spaces - the spa that Dena (Dakota Fanning) works at, the idyllic farm where Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) lives - to the point that when Josh and Dena purchase a boat together, Reichardt has Josh enter the seller's home and, in a quick pan around his dining room and living room, lets us briefly relish in the comfort of his suburban life. So it ought to be immediately suspicious that Night Moves, Reichardt's ultimately unsatisfying new film, portrays nature at first as a calm refuge and emphasizes the peaceful homes that its characters inhabit. Reichardt's characters have also tended to be defined by their rootlessness, whether it's the pioneers or Wendy searching for new homes across the country, the runaway lovers in River of Grass fleeing past lives in Florida, or nomadic Kurt aimlessly wandering the streets of Portland at the end of Old Joy. In Wendy and Lucy, when Wendy is forced to sleep in the woods after her car breaks down on the way to Alaska, she wakes up in the middle of the night to a deranged man talking to himself right by her side. In Meek's Cutoff, a group of 19th century settlers nearly lose their lives while traveling west across the scorching Oregon desert. The natural world has never been the most hospitable place for Kelly Reichardt's characters. In Night Moves, Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and two other partners in crime (played by Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard) plot to load a boat with explosives and blow up a dam in an act of consciousness-raising eco-terrorism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |