Gus Van Sant’s Gerry is very slow and very beautiful, and once
again, very slow but for a good purpose. It tells the story of two guys, played
by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who get lost on a hiking trail in Death Valley
and are unable to find their way back to their car. For days, they walk and
they walk and they walk. Van Sant composes shots that are so long that they
sometimes seem endless. The protracted time spent on unbroken shots communicates
the sense of dread and the longer we spend time with the characters in these
shots, the more urgency the movie has in finding refuge for its characters.
So many of today’s movies are cobbled together with flashy camerawork
and slice and dice cutting. Gerry is a rejuvenating experience for cinema
lovers. It’s a movie that reminds us of the true meaning of visual composition
and avante-garde experimentation. It’s a movie that dares to be different
and require its viewers to dare to try something new. It dares us to look at
movies differently. It can be either an exhilarating experience for you or an
exasperating one. Not all movies connect with all people and there’s a
chance you’ll turn it off after fifteen minutes or a chance that you’ll
be mesmerized by its images and emotionally impacted in ways that no movie has
reached you in years. My suggestion is to rent the DVD first and risk a couple
of bucks (that way you’ll know whether you love it or hate it) and then
buy it if you find yourself ecstatic by the visuals and perpetually engrossed
by Van Sant’s groundbreaking freedom from the standard filmmaking form.
Make no mistake though. This movie is no casual diversion even for the art house
connoisseur. This is one of the few movies, like Breaking the Waves,
like Eyes Wide Shut, like Magnolia that penetrates your nerve
centers, frustrating and provoking you, stirring you into operatic emotions.
The characters endless journey, capitalized by a phenomenal endless shot near
the conclusion that tracks the characters exhausted sludge to ultimate destination
nowhere, gets under your skin and asks you to share their own pain. Gerry
causes feelings of pain and frustration, but it’s not the same feeling
you get from watching bad commercial films, it’s a feeling of empathy
that you develop for its characters. You may find yourself that you’ve
been watching ordinary machine-made movies for a year that have desensitized
your feelings. With Gerry, you should be thankful that a movie makes
you feel pain and frustration because at least it’s a movie that makes
you feel anything.
There is a laundry list of things that make this movie different from the average
movie. The first lines of dialogue are not spoken it seems like until the first
fifteen minutes. We watch a car drive down the lost and lonely highway. Van
Sant composes not only long shots of this happening but creates a sad symphony
with his soundtrack music. Once the characters are out in the desert and away
from their car, Van Sant uses across the line photography (shots that break
the boundaries of geographical perspective) to signature that the characters
are lost. The characters walk and walk and sporadically shoot suggestions at
each other. At one point they’re no longer emphasizing that returning
to their car is their top priority, but rather to find water is more essential.
Van Sant follows them with long tracking shots, concluding several of his scenes
with long widescreen shots from a perched apex to show the characters as tiny
specks in a vast unaccommodating desert. Van Sant’s most provoking tactic
that might enrage you is how he cuts in on his characters walking for several
minutes in close-up signifying an internal struggle before cutting back to wide
shots to emphasize the external struggle. The entire Van Sant verité
style can be interpreted differently by other viewers by ultimately he is striking
some complex emotional chords with his work here but they’re done visually
instead of through filler dialogue.
That the movie is unmistakably simple in plot is all the more ironic to today’s
overstuffed elephant commercial product. The movie is a quiet, prescient meditation
on sad disaster: two dudes go retreating to God’s magnificent natural
creation only to get lost in its vast, mystifying, insurmountable landscape
– a happenstance of tragedy trouncing their innocent holiday escapade.
Damon and Affleck rarely have anything to say to each other, they’re just
typical detached American jocks who masquerade their feelings only until desperation
and imminent death triggers them to experience soul communion.
Maybe some fifty years from now, film historians might point to Gerry
and Van Sant’s other film from this year Elephant as the two most
essential art films of 2003. Elephant has received some laudatory praise
for replicating the massacre of Columbine a few years ago and for its portrayal
of disaffected and confused youth. Gerry came first (it was released
briefly in February) and did not receive overall supporting reviews but instead
was scathingly dismissed except by a few perceptive critics like Owen Gleiberman
of Entertainment Weekly and Manohola Dargis of the L.A. Times that understood
its vibe. The majority of dismissals can only be explained that many critics
today attend movies with predetermined agendas and refuse to look at movies
that are too different with a fresh eye. The DVD does have one extra feature
– a documentary called “Salt Lake Van Sant” and this is the
one facet that could be labeled as redundant. The only interesting sight is
of a dolly track that seems to be stretched out for miles across the desert.
Other than that, the doc is not really pertinent. Movie: **** Extras: *1/2
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