Movies into Film
Gerry
Directed by Gus Van Sant
The Safety of Objects
Directed by Rose Troche
USA, 2003
Affleck and Damon (Photo: ThinkFilm)
BABES & BARBIE DOLLS
Gus Van Sant’s latest film Gerry depicts two young men who set out for a hike in Death Valley carrying neither backpacks nor water bottles. Their lone sustenance consists of one can of soda pop apiece and a pack of cigarettes. These apparent novices—who lord their ability to crack puzzles on “Wheel of Fortune” well ahead of the game show’s contestants—get lost amid the Southwestern brush, and over the movie’s hour and 43-minute course we watch them unravel.
For any serious student of film, Gerry is a must-see. Harris Savides’ compositionally astounding cinematography has rightly earned him comparison to Ansel Adams. The way Savides captures light shifting through rugged terrain, especially in early dawn sequences, creates an enveloping sense of wonder and terror. Kudos as well to Leslie Shatz’s thoughtful sound design that complements, deepens the riddle that Van Sant presents. And the director succinctly chose an icily minimalist work by Arvo Pärt, the plaintive violin and piano duet Spiegel im Spiegel, to accompany a lonely drive over barren highways in the extended opening shot. (Pärt’s title translates as “mirror within a mirror.”) Additionally, Fred Frith supplies dissonant electronica for the film’s hallucinatory final third. Rich in texture and mood, Gerry shimmers as a visual and aural poem.
There’s just one problem: it’s empty. The director’s themes and his characters are as hollowed out as they can be without collapsing. The two men, both named Gerry, are ably played by a touchingly sweet Casey Affleck and an expressionless Matt Damon. What little talk they exchange leaks out like code. Damon remarks that their campfire is “hot on my front and cold on my back”; Affleck attributes feelings of “body shame” to desert animals mating in the wild. And when one of the men—parched, weary, and beset by mirages—finally extends an arm in tender embrace to the other, the rejection of compassion takes no less brutal a form than murder.
And why—why!—does Van Sant clothe Affleck in a shirt that has an enormous gold star in the center? I spent most of the film’s duration trying to deduce the symbolism of that gold star. Does it mean that he’s been a good boy? Van Sant has read his Camus and his Beckett, too, and possibly watched Picnic at Hanging Rock half a dozen times; he hasn’t devised a means to make Gerry’s homoerotic underpinnings as alive and kicking for us as they so clearly are for him.
Close, Clarkson, and House in The Safety of Objects (Photos: IFC Films)
A much less arid, a more populous, and an infinitely better movie than Gerry is Rose Troche’s The Safety of Objects. With only her third feature, Troche (she debuted with the 1994 polemic Go Fish) emerges as a major force. Her directing is so self-assured, her way with actors so generous, and her shifts in tone so much the opposite of jarring, that the film’s few lapses I find eminently forgivable. Fashioning several short stories by A.M. Homes into a single tapestry, Troche achieves something rare in movies: she’s made a film about torment that assays its points without tormenting the audience.
In the central role of a mother who meticulously tends to her paralyzed grown son, Glenn Close does some of her most radiant work. Close conveys pain with neither fuss nor mannerisms. It’s been so long since I’d seen her in a decent movie, I had forgotten how good, how effective she can be. In flashbacks we see the son, a somewhat talented rock musician, perform at a neighborhood bar; in one scene, after the accident that silences his voice, Close drives by the club and pulls up outside, pops a tape of her son’s band in the cassette deck and just listens without going inside. It’s a testament to Troche and Close’s empathetic power that the enormity of private loss not only engulfs the screen, it seems to seep into the very theatre we’re sitting in.
The Safety of Objects also features standout performances by Mary Kay Place, Patricia Clarkson, Moira Kelly, and a young actor named Alex House. To watch Place—I have loved her since Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman—in such a plum role is a treat, an incontrovertible treat. Practicing tai chi, preaching self-esteem, and crusading against sugar, Place confiscates her children’s pop tarts, warning them “the crash isn’t worth the high.” As a divorcée who has known conversations with barstools, Clarkson here earns all the unearned praise she received for Far From Heaven. Kelly, in a smaller role, is unwaveringly first-rate as the salt graining wife of a slightly loco attorney (an excellent Dermot Mulroney) who has forsaken his firm for the life of a mall rat. As their son, 11-year old House triumphs in what may be the most difficult turn. The sexuality of children, always a tricky cinematic subject, emerges one of the film’s major themes, and House—who hears the mermaids singing in Barbie-doll form—combines believability with astute comic timing. — NPT
March 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com