'Old Joy' review

With her fifth film, the River of Grass's director takes us on an intimate road to nowhere

By Sheba White
Published: August 10th, 2006 | 9:07pm

It's one of those hypothetical questions that would probably come from one of the main characters in Kelly Reichardt's adaptation of Jonathan Raymond's short story Old Joy: what would happen if the United States had been settled west to east, instead of east to west? Would we speak like characters in Twin Peaks? Would we have a different sense of place in the natural world around us? Would we have stopped searching for our piece of paradise long ago? So lyrical is the film Old Joy that it prompts one to think of unanswerable questions like these.

Old Joy is the story of two Portland friends - Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham) - who, just over the lip of adulthood (Mark is just about to become a father, and Kurt is on the verge of becoming the town's "uncle") decide to reconnect on a one-day, go-east-young-man trip to Oregon's Cascade Mountains in the hopes of recapturing some sense of their prior hipster bond. Fifteen minutes into the film, it's apparent why they grew apart: Mark drives a Volvo, is tied to his cell, and plans ahead, while Kurt plans to bring to the trip a cooler, a wagon, and a TV, and has barely settled into the passenger seat before he pulls out one of his many trademark pseudo-philosophical, surfer-hippie rants to the very real-life news that Mark's 70-year-old father has developed a brain tumor shortly after leaving Mark's mother. "It's kinda like when an old Eskimo goes out to die alone," Kurt says, taking a puff from weed Mark unwillingly funded, and then shrugs off Mark's pregnant silence to his vacuous insensitivity with "who knows?"

So much time could be spent watching the beguiling Will Oldham, known primarily for his musical work as the creator behind Bonnie Prince Billy and the many Palace incarnations, quirkily fit into his role as Kurt, and comparing this role to his other roles in Junebug or Matewan, that it's easy to get lost in this aspect of the film and not notice the assured and eerily uncomfortable, dead-on performance of Daniel London (Rent, Minority Report, and the husband of singer-songwriter Megan Reilly), who captures so perfectly the essence of a man equally, but unknowingly, trapped within his own seemingly inflexible destiny.

As much as the film is centered on the subtle dynamics between these two, and as short as the script adaptation of Raymond's story is (it runs to a mere 76 minutes), the Northwest landscape of the Cascade Mountains provides Reichardt with an expansive cinematic and emotional sweep that hasn't been seen since Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, an understandable comparison given that Reichardt has worked with Haynes on his previous projects, and he is listed as a producer on Old Joy. Where the two differ is in the details, with Reichardt exploiting Raymond's familiar theme of nature's affect on our human progress and on our sense of intimacy. There is a feeling throughout this essentially flawless movie, helped along by Yo La Tengo's Jim Jarmusch-y soundtrack, that there is no escape from nature, neither human nor environmental. It doesn't matter where you start, Reichardt's film suggests, you'll always end up fighting your way to a spot uncomfortably close to the place you thought you were avoiding.