Odd Couple

Old Joy

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Few filmmakers pay attention to the atmosphere of the locations they shoot in, but that's Kelly Reichardt's immediate virtue. She even employs a "location sound" expert to get the right quench out of an Oregon hot spring. Reichardt observes two distant friends in the meticulously detailed Old Joy as they travel the open spaces of Oregon. But their journey into the wilds proves they have little in common. Life has happened to them, represented by the distracted political comments heard on the car radio and the variable climate which becomes the movie's almost palpable substance. Mark (Daniel London) is now a family man and Kurt (Will Oldham) has aged into a hippie-hillbilly hybrid-a wannabe rebel, an outcast and a drop out. Old Joy details the old friends' disharmony while also picking out details of Pacific Northwest scenery. One concise image from inside a car trunk shows the men loading-up for their trip while the sound of bells directs attention to a white steepled church in the background. This specific shot establishes place but also shows the men's detachment from it (and from the unification that church represents).

Reichardt's descriptive travelogue style asserts the ways you can get lost in this country. She highlights a wilderness that's not just found in nature. Nature becomes a metaphor for the possibility of social dislocation. Old Joy's gentility could be called a woman's take on Deliverance, but it's really just indie persnicketyness. Old Joy stays high-minded about human behavior, and yet one walks away thinking, "I have no idea who those people really are."

Reichadt foregrounds naturalism rather than risk the tumultuous gender analysis found in Deliverance. While appreciating Reichardt's reticence-she's part of the same quotidian filmmaking school as Ira Sachs, Jon Jost, Rob Nilsson, early Charles Burnett-her worthy insights compete with stronger, direct expressions of American experience. It's honorable that Old Joy doesn't turn into a horror show like Hostel or Wolf Creek-movies that falsify and vulgarize the delicate facts of human relations-yet this film's probity creates a different kind of frustration.

Mark and Kurt don't know each other anymore; their wariness reflects a more general and disturbing national distrust. This truth about growing up and of post-high school maturity is rarely admitted. (Sideways slyly exposed it when one man became disloyal and confessed the accident of his friendship with another.)

Reichardt seems to be searching for the spiritual roots of the red state/blue state divide but then goes wan. (Her use of Air America Radio broadcasts suggests a struggle with today's timid progressivism.) Granted, Reichardt is a defiantly unemphatic filmmaker, but there should be more to her revelations on changed friendship than atmospheric political metaphors. There was indeed more in the best American film on this subject, Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen's 1955 musical, It's Always Fair Weather-even its title has more wit.