Don’t Care About The Book

A Coming (& Going)-Of-Age Film From Kelly Reichardt



Good movies are rarely made from great books.

There are the rare exceptions (think of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) that succeed mainly by trying to be something quite different from the books on which they’re based.

For the most part, however, filmmakers are content to abridge and abbreviate, jogging along behind the novel’s action, cameras in hand. Narrative voice is transformed into voice over – to quite different effect – in which hard-to-film subtleties of language can be slathered over by a fruity accent.

I’ve never read the short story on which Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Old Joy, is based, and now, I’m not inclined to. That’s because, in her small, lush feature, Reichardt has reversed the usual calculus, and given us an adaptation whose original could only – if perhaps unfairly – prove a disappointment.

Old Joy is a road movie, but one in which the road ends up being a closed loop. In this pocket Odyssey, two old friends cross the perilous straits between past and present, less transformed by their journey, than numbed by the passage of time.

What is remarkable about Old Joy, however, is the way it tells its tale – through silences rather than words. Reichardt’s searching camera is most expressive when focused – not on the characters who are talking – but on those who are listening. As a result, it speaks in a language unique to film, in a register too high for readers to hear.

The action itself is fairly simple: old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) reunite and set off on an overnight camping trek to find Bagby’s Hot Springs – a spot both beautiful and beatific, nestled in the heavily wooded mountains outside Portland. On the way, times are caught up on, much pot is smoked (at least by Kurt), and the way, inevitably, is lost.

Forced to spend the night in a trash-strewn campsite, Mark listens, bemused, while Kurt shares his brilliantly stoned grasp of astrophysics (“the universe is a teardrop, falling through space”). But Mark’s amusement quickly turns to embarrassment when Kurt, in an almost unbearably awkward moment, tells Mark how much he desperately regrets the distance that’s grown up between them.

That distance, and the awkward feelings that accompany it, are not so easily to be dispelled. The lives of the two men have gone in quite different directions since the time they were close friends. Mark, now a prematurely harried, father-soon-to-be, senses that it’s time to leave such childish things behind, while dreading the less childish things that will replace them. Kurt, on the other hand, an aging, yet still childlike slacker, seems to have crossed that subtle but unmistakable divide between being a free spirit…and being essentially homeless.

But the beauty of their story – and in Reichardt’s telling of it – lay not in how much, but rather in how little the two men had themselves changed. It’s not we who are altered with time, Old Joy seems to say, but the world that alters around us. And like the urban landscape that gradually gives way to primeval forest, the shift can be so gradual that we don’t notice until it literally surrounds us.

By the time the friends finally reach their forest nirvana -- immersing themselves, naked, beneath the hot waters in a ritual of rebirth that’s at once mocking and loving – they already know there’s no cure for time. Like the hum of samsara that intrudes on Mark’s attempt at meditation, the world will have its way.

It is a rare treat to watch Oldham and London wordlessly express the way that discomfort turns to pity and pity to fear. And it’s an even rarer one to be given the space to watch them, as Reichardt’s camera lingers in reaction shots so lengthy and so tight that they make you long to look away.

In the end, however, it’s well worth keeping your eyes on the filmmaker’s art. With barely a false note, Old Joy offers us a snapshot of the universe in motion, and a reminder of the speed with which it turns.

But for all that, the mood of the movie is less bittersweet than worldly wise. Despite our best intentions, life teaches us that friends will grow apart and beauty will become shopworn. That is the price of living. And perhaps for Reichardt, also the seed of art.

While we are welcome to share in Kurt’s realization that “sadness is just worn-out joy,” she also seems to say that we are bound to remember that corollary in reverse – that joy, no matter how bright, is only unexplored sadness.