Old Joy

How one rates Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is going to depend on where one sits on the art-entertainment scale. Self-styled aesthetes will find the film a masterpiece of laconic alt-country minimalism, anyone expecting a fun-filled plot, engaging characters and zesty dialogue is heading for a WTF experience.  

There is no doubt that in its own terms Old Joy is an impressive experience. Peter Sillen’s fine cinematography of the Oregon landscape and the acoustic guitar-based score by Yo La Tengo harmonize perfectly with the decidedly low-key story which the director/co-writer invests with just a soupçon of unease.

Mark (Daniel London), a thirty-ish woodwork teacher and soon-to-be father is rung up one day by Kurt (Will Oldham) and invited to go to some hot springs near their home town of Portland, Oregon. They drive into the mountains, get lost, camp in some ad hoc refuse dump and spend the evening drinking beer around a fire and shooting at empty cans with a pellet gun. The next day, they find the springs, soak in hot tubs for a while and drive back to Portland. A dog called Lucy goes along with them

The very antithesis of the conventional Hollywood road trip movie, Old Joy is largely plotless and its two protagonists are unremarkble New Age nerds, who once were besties but now have grown apart,msinly it would seem due to Mark’s decision to move on and “grow up”, something which is signified by his listening to talk radio. Dope-smoking Kurt, on the other hand, is still languishing in their post-adolescent dreams of a more enlightened world.  Neither of them appear to be happy (hence the “old joy”) and there is a kind of Brokeback Mountain vibe to their relationship which Reichardt just stays on the cusp of (perhaps this is made more explicit in Jonathan Raymond’s short story which he adapted with Reichardt for the film). It is at once a very rich and a very lean portrait of a relationship, resolutely mundane and craftily elusive, seductively engrossing and frustratingly under-developed and definitely for contemplatives rather than action junkies.

FYI: Reichardt has developed her style with narratively more complex works like Wendy And Lucy (2008).  If you like Reichardt's work, the "pastoral" films of David Gordon Green such as George Washington (2000) should prove rewarding

 

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