Lost Lost Lost
Gerry (2002)
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: no cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Gerry, for me, is almost without worth, a film that devalues landscape, scriptwriting, acting, editing, and direction by never exercising a choice. When a camera is allowed to pan indefinitely, or an actor to sit staring off to the right of the frame for minutes at a time, the director abdicates his claim to authorship, and makes instead a collection of images that are rudderless, without intent, and, subsequently, without consequence.
The movie occupies three dramatically different landscapes (filmed across multiple continents); each place, in itself, is too unique to be anonymous, but Van Sant reduces all of them to the sounds of either wind or silence, to the mere color gradations of sunset or sunrise - to metaphors for isolation that clarify nothing, whether Matt Damon and Casey Affleck take their hike through Utah or Argentina. When Van Sant isn’t lobbing tumbleweeds at his actors' backs through a canyon (has a tumbleweed ever seemed more out of place in a movie?), he reminds us that terrain is not profound simply because someone thought to bring along a camera.
In Lawrence of Arabia, of course, the point in the desert rides in towards the camera and becomes a man on horseback. The scope of the heat and sand frame his narrative, his personality, his philosophy. The scene is wordless because the vision says volumes. In Gerry, the desert is a space and the characters two people. It is either a comedy about Will Hunting lost outside of Cambridge, or nothing at all. Not even pretty pictures, considering the wilderness they're working with.
And still, somehow, someone like Stephen Holden (a man who is paid for his opinions about film) references the movies of Abbas Kiarostami - a director whose relationship with environment could not be more different - in a review. Somehow Beckett is invoked, when I was reminded instead, in Damon and Affleck's endless repetition of the word "gerry," of two Vermont cops daring each other to say "meow" on a routine traffic stop in Super Troopers.
directed by Gus Van Sant
rating: no cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Gerry, for me, is almost without worth, a film that devalues landscape, scriptwriting, acting, editing, and direction by never exercising a choice. When a camera is allowed to pan indefinitely, or an actor to sit staring off to the right of the frame for minutes at a time, the director abdicates his claim to authorship, and makes instead a collection of images that are rudderless, without intent, and, subsequently, without consequence.
The movie occupies three dramatically different landscapes (filmed across multiple continents); each place, in itself, is too unique to be anonymous, but Van Sant reduces all of them to the sounds of either wind or silence, to the mere color gradations of sunset or sunrise - to metaphors for isolation that clarify nothing, whether Matt Damon and Casey Affleck take their hike through Utah or Argentina. When Van Sant isn’t lobbing tumbleweeds at his actors' backs through a canyon (has a tumbleweed ever seemed more out of place in a movie?), he reminds us that terrain is not profound simply because someone thought to bring along a camera.
In Lawrence of Arabia, of course, the point in the desert rides in towards the camera and becomes a man on horseback. The scope of the heat and sand frame his narrative, his personality, his philosophy. The scene is wordless because the vision says volumes. In Gerry, the desert is a space and the characters two people. It is either a comedy about Will Hunting lost outside of Cambridge, or nothing at all. Not even pretty pictures, considering the wilderness they're working with.
And still, somehow, someone like Stephen Holden (a man who is paid for his opinions about film) references the movies of Abbas Kiarostami - a director whose relationship with environment could not be more different - in a review. Somehow Beckett is invoked, when I was reminded instead, in Damon and Affleck's endless repetition of the word "gerry," of two Vermont cops daring each other to say "meow" on a routine traffic stop in Super Troopers.
posted by NPK at 10:29 AM
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