Kelly Reichardt

[Matt]

Night Moves is a movie I respect but didn’t really enjoy. I can’t point to anything particular that I had a problem with. It might just be that Jesse Eisenberg is not, to me, an interesting screen presence. He played his opaque and unlikeable character perfectly though, and I actually found the last third

Spoiler

when it becomes a character study of how far someone will go to protect himself and yet never feel protected

was far more interesting than the first two thirds, which is your basic heist movie setup stripped down. I also enjoyed when

Spoiler

his character is told that the explosion of the dam was pointless because there are so many other dams in place and that, oh, by the way, that explosion killed someone

which is what sets the third act in motion.

Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (and her other films as well) explores similar off-the-grid characters (though the plot has nothing in common with Reichardt’s film). I think it, though maybe more conventional in style, provides a better way into these characters’ lives and ways of thinking.

Reichardt’s own First Cow feels similar and better, working with a similar “heist” plot but on a much smaller scale, and the heist feels necessary for survival and not a perhaps misguided attempt at social righteousness.

Haven’t seen the How to Blow Up a Pipeline movie and probably don’t really care to.

[therewillbeblus]

I've come to believe Night Moves is Reichardt's masterpiece, especially after realizing the profound subtext she's issuing in my last watch (spread across two posts on the previous page). It's so risky, provocative, and rich - 'attuned minimalism' weaponized to coerce us into sitting with the mud of moral sacrifice against self-preservation. It's especially daring in an age of escalating public sociopolitical extremism, cheekily using one subset of progressive groups to unveil how not even they -who demand clarity and that everyone subscribes to their version of what that clarity 'is'- can evade the grayness of life conflict. The slowness isn't utilized so much to demonstrate moments of grace in human interaction nor the thrills in the banal moments of missions, but cumulatively prioritizes focus on the loneliness and insecurity that seeps into even the tightest of ideological bubbles

[domino harvey]

I am somewhere in the middle of the opinions here on Showing Up. I liked a lot of the small moments here and there, but ultimately I think there is a lot of material that amounts to missed potential because it never goes anywhere or builds into something more than minor key twinkling. Which, I guess, is the point, but there are so many component parts that could, with one simple fresh pass of the material, amount to more. I believe the biggest issue here is that Reichardt is a director of exteriors, not interiors-- both physically and psychologically. It's hard to reconcile the director of this as the director of films that rank amongst the best of the year they were released like Wendy and Lucy and First Cow, because those were films that used the outer doors as a kind of unfeeling loneliness incubator. Here Reichardt is trapped mostly indoors, in drab architectures of apartment condos and art colleges that are indifferently rendered. The shorts on the A24 disc also reveal a bigger problem with the main feature tied to this, namely that Reichardt doesn't really have any ideas or interest in the creative process beyond the presentational-- her shorts here are narrative-free YouTube videos of artists working, and that in itself is not insight. The notion that art's value is self-apparent is antithetical to critical appreciation and vaguely anti-intellectual at best. Exterior actions can reveal interior insights, but that doesn't really occur in this film. Instead we get minute slice of life moments that we've seen in different wrappings via countless indie films from the last few decades, but these don't amount to much because there's never any real financial or professional threat in Williams' lead-up to her show. Wendy and Lucy and First Cow are heavily tied to their nuanced critiques of capitalism, but Williams and her family are doing fine economically (a quibble about a $150 vet bill on a credit card means much less dramatically when your dad is a retired respected artist who could easily bail you out if needed, &c). Hong Chau is doing better than fine. No one from the faculty down to the students has any significant conflicts here, financial or otherwise. And that's fine if there was more here in their absence, but I'm not sure there is. Art is a cup that the artist fills halfway and the audience tops off in digesting and making meaning from it, but Reichardt has not given us much in the vessel to start with.