(2005)
4
Josh Ralske
Kelly Reichardt makes a triumphant return to feature filmmaking with the gorgeously elegiac road movie, Old Joy. Collaborating with writer Jonathan Raymond, cinematographer Peter Sillen, and actors Will Oldham and Daniel London, and utilizing and perfectly attuned original score by Yo La Tengo, Reichardt has crafted a deeply intimate, personal, and true-to-life story of two estranged friends on a camping trip. Even more remarkably, Old Joy subtly delivers a devastatingly incisive political message that speaks volumes about the failures of liberalism in the age of "Dubya." In the end, Mark (London) clings to his virtuous ideology (look at the pleasure he gets in listening to Air America, or in his own outrage at an overheard comment about the war) much more tightly than he clings to his friendship with Kurt (Oldham), who actually lives his life by those ideals, and suffers for it. But the characters are far from mere symbols. Much of the film's dry humor and poignancy derives from the extent to which London and Oldham individuate them and flesh them out. With its long tracking shots across the backwoods mountain roads of Oregon, Old Joy could be mistaken for a landscape film, but the landscape it maps is as much spiritual as it is physical, and the personal story it tells is inescapably political, just as the form of Reichardt's quiet, deliberate, and beautifully shot movie, with its abundance of visual and verbal wit, perfectly suits the slow burn of its content -- its achingly exquisite tale of reconciliation and abandonment.
Trailer
cast-crew for Old Joy on AllMovie
Old Joy (2005)
