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Film Review: Old Joy

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By: Alibastard | in: Movies |

If it wasn’t such a trivializing deduction, I’d call Old Joy one of the best buddy/road trip movies I’ve ever seen.

Old Joy

Kelly Reichardt reflectively captures that lost air that freely wanders through the liberal north west, book-ending a daytrip between two old friends with the similarly meandering jibber-jabber of blue state radio.
The charmingly ragamuffin Kurt (musician Will Oldham) and the fey dad-to-be Mark (Daniel London) embark on a softly confused journey to the Oregon hot springs, doing little more than discussing past personal events between them, some clearly under-thought and yet poetically interpreted theories on super string theory, and silently attempting to reconcile the enormous divides that have kept them emotionally stand-offish.
Beginning with Portland, Oregon as the perfect stage for a quiet gaze into the Progressive culture of cold, working women and inward, un-assertive men, Reichardt’s portrait is refreshingly unimpressed with our changing gender norms, but is distinctly non-judgmental. Men and women still have the same difficulty communicating with each other. One relationship, Mark’s marriage, feels the subdued tension from another, Mark’s friendship with Kurt. Similarly, the disparate agenda’s of the two friends quietly battle as they travel together from the city to its pine-filled outskirts and back again. Obviously, despite our political interests, a tame reminder that ideological superiority is no cure-all abounds.

Old Joy

Reichardt’s deliberate images of Portland make it feel like a different world, begun after the fall of conventional civilization, with a grand new agenda’s idealized shine just beginning to lose its luster. As we pass from Portland’s abandoned city lots, lumber yards and distinctly unpretentious homes to the engulfing foliage of the outskirt forests, a natural sense of nature’s calming affects takes hold without beating us over the head. And as Kurt and Mark’s relationship rehearses its multitude of quiet strains and distresses, a calm idea of the sad universe, the pains of adulthood and the fading glow of friendship play out, dancing alongside Oldham’s elf-ish smile and his eventually rather bittersweet, all encompassing perspective.
What surfaces from the meditative cataloguing of their relationship is a sense of our struggling generation, on the verge of losing hope, anesthetizing all those quiet pains with easy drugs, unsentimental excursions and silent resentments too ugly to be said by dutifully liberal-minded lips.
Somewhere along the way, we learn to identify sorrow as a component of happiness, the crumbling of relationships as the inevitable eulogy for being allotted the benefit of joy in the first place. And this realization seeps into all of these areas, of love, of friendship, age, politics, even nature.
And the realization may not cure-all, but it helps.


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Posted on March 13, 2007

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