User Reviews

I just finished watching this on DVD at home.

I did enjoy the film though it could have achieved a greater depth.

At just over 70 minutes, the movie is short, which is fine. In fact, I think one should approach this film like one would a short story. Don't expect a full novel's worth of plot.

Some of the comments have talked about the dialog between the two main characters as being..well..underdeveloped at best. And while this is true, it could also be seen as exactly the point of where the relationship between these two friends is at. Unfortunately, it can also lead to less than compelling viewing for the audience.

I must admit, I was sorry to see one reviewer talk about the scene where the one guy gives the other a shoulder rub as an overblown homo-erotic moment. I think that was simply the one character's way of literally getting in touch with his friend. Obviously neither friend seemed to be able to reach the other one verbally, so I think this was simply a spontaneous way for the one friend to reach out and bond with his friend and offer a simple shoulder rub. I think sometimes in our jaded world, we can't even let any physical contact be simply an act of affection.

Like I said, I DID like the movie. It's beautiful, nice and slow and doesn't try to be more than what it is.

And it was a refreshing change to see a film (short though it was) just be DIFFERENT than 99% of the stuff that's usually offered.

For that alone, it really does deserve a mention.

A deceptively simple, in fact richly nuanced, subtle film about two old college chums, now in their 30s, who go on a weekend camping trip and discover that their lives have diverged to the point where the bonds that remain between them have become too thin, too attenuated, to sustain their friendship further.

Kurt (Will Oldham) is still the same unsettled, shambling fellow that he always was, forever searching for a formula to bring him peace of mind, unemployed, living in his van, passing through town before going on to the next place. Early on, Kurt tells his old buddy Mark (Daniel London) that recently he's found the right path to happiness, but Mark knows (and we know) that it's not true. Kurt bums money from Mark to score some pot on their way out of town (Kurt proceeds to smoke it all himself).

Mark has put down roots. He's married, about to become a father, and has a steady job. But he's no yuppie: he lives modestly, still meditates, does volunteer youth work, and drives an old Volvo station wagon, his ear glued to Air America talk shows when he's driving alone. Kurt points to their differences when he tells Mark, "I never get myself into something I can't easily get out of." Awareness that this trip will seal an end to the men's friendship comes to them - and to us - gradually, obliquely, almost tacitly. It begins when Kurt can't recall the signposts to reach their intended destination in the lower Cascades (the entire film was shot in Portland and its rural surrounds), reflecting the disorder in his life. So after driving here and there, they end up pitching their tent at a bleak, litter strewn spot just off the highway.

A bit later, around a campfire, there is little spontaneity in the friends' conversation. Kurt speaks of a wonderful gathering he recently attended, full of music, dancing and fun. He talks vaguely about his personal theory of the universe as a falling teardrop. "I don't have the numbers but I just know I'm right about this," Kurt says. Mark's only response to these overtures is a glazed eyed glance. Kurt tries to be more direct, saying that he feels an uncomfortable gulf between them, but Mark brushes this aside. Rather than becoming a beer fueled, cozy, guy reunion, lasting into the wee hours, the evening ends early, abruptly and in silence.

Next day, during an interlude at Bagby Hot Springs, when Kurt again attempts to bridge the gulf by massaging Mark's shoulders, this gesture seems only to make Mark tense. In fact he is preoccupied throughout the trip, guilty for leaving his pregnant wife at home alone, talking with her frequently on his cell. On the drive back into the city, the old friends speak hardly a word, and, at the end, they exchange only the most cursory of goodbyes.

We all know that friendships from our youth sometimes stay alive and sometimes die. That people's values, aims and lifestyles can change. Or not. Nearly a generation ago, films like "Return of the Secaucus 7" and "The Big Chill" took long looks at these themes. There are, however, so many characters in each of those large ensemble films that only superficial snapshots of most are possible. After college, the majority in both films had gone on to exceptional careers. In contrast, Mark and Kurt are - in their differing ways - plain, ordinary, Everymen. And with its singular focus on just two people, "Old Joy" is able to offer us a deeply intimate - one might even say delicate, yet entirely natural and unforced - account about old friends whose paths have separated.

One can readily see that Mark has matured while Kurt remains stuck in late adolescence. Viewed through another prism, we could as easily surmise that Kurt has endeavored to stick to his youthful ideals, a would be free spirit still seeking out the good times and refusing to be yoked to greater responsibilities in a world grown harsher than it used to be. Yet we sense Kurt's underlying unhappiness. His vagabond quest has led to no discoveries of lasting significance.

Mark has crossed over a line that separates him inexorably from Kurt, a line that demarcates acceptance, compromise, the "adult" adjustments one makes to become self supporting, to love and to be generative. Both men have lost something precious they once had shared, a common vision of life and the world perhaps. And they have lost one another. Fittingly, at one point Kurt shares with Mark a Chinese proverb: "Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy." Even more fittingly, it is the quietude, the silences, that give this wonderfully realized film its lyrical, elegiac quality. My grades: 8.5/10 (A-)(Seen on 09/16/06)

This movie is really about the aftermath of the sixties. The sixties were a great time of bonding, love, drugs, experimentation, communal living, group houses, nudity and doing your own thing. What happened next? Most of the youth of the sixties grew up, got jobs, started families, and, essentially, "joined the establishment".

That's Mark. But his friend Kurt is the sixties denizen who never grew out of it, and wants it to be like it was in the old days. Mark, not wanting to hurt his friend, and perhaps to verify for himself that he cannot go back (to the old days), agrees to go on the trip to the hot springs. But he doesn't really like being lost in the woods, the camp site has become a dump, he resents his free-loading friend, realizes that nothing his friend says makes sense any more, and the road signs have faded to the point of being blank. The most telling point in the movie is the remark Mark makes to his wife, "But look at what we're dealing with here" (talking about Kurt).

It's obvious that the film maker is making a huge statement that the sixties are over. The signs are lost, and the bath house is in shambles. The land is still beautiful, but the desire is gone. But what I don't understand is how negative she is about the choices. Kurt appears to end up lost and homeless. Mark goes back to what appears to be less-than-ideal marriage and a stressed-out life. Is that all there is? Depressing as the movie turns out to be, I still think it's an interesting film. It's a little more like real life than we usually want to see in the movies, but the sparsity of the dialog, and the inability to read the characters' minds require each watcher to interpret what they see in their own way. The fact that you're really not sure what the filmmaker wanted to say can be considered a plus when you discuss this movie the next day.

"Ideally, nothing should be shown. But that's impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them." - Robert Bresson

"Old Joy" tells the story of two friends, Kurt and Mark, who reunite for a weekend camping trip in the Cascade mountains. They pack their things into Mark's car, get lost, find their camp site, chat, chill out at Bagby Hot Springs, pack their things back into Mark's car, and return home. They then wave good bye and go on their separate ways. Cue credits.

It's a simple tale. Below the surface, however, director Kelly Reichardt is up to other things. In Reichardt's hands, Kurt (ably played by Will Oldham, cast because of his role in John Sayles' similarly themed "Matewan") becomes the embodiment of a dying liberal class; an outmoded "movement" content to wield obsolete, impractical slogans whilst refusing to act. Kurt, a relic of the sixties, directionless, his life a shambles, his car battered and ill-suited for this trek, has been supplanted by a country full of Marks, a young father who finds himself torn between a life of Kurt-like intractability, and the conformity and comfort of techno-capitalism. Mark is sympathetic to Kurt, of course, but knows that if he doesn't abandon his friend he will become, like Kurt, a walking dead man. Mark's choice thus epitomises the deadlock of modern politics: he can wither outside the "system", or surrender and lead the kind of complacent "American Dream" that is expected of him. He surrenders, but Reichardt doesn't damn him.

If the film is also sympathetic toward Kurt, who has the soul of an artist, the tenderness of a woman, the idealism of a child, the conscience of an angel, it nevertheless makes a point of how much of a raggedy, ineffectual simpleton he ultimately is. Of course, the liberal class was not always this way. It once made possible the New Deal, during the 60s expressed the discontent of African-Americans, minorities and the anti war movement, fought for civil rights, gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight hour work day, social security etc etc. Today, though, it finds itself unable or unwilling to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives, it refuses to concede that power has been wrestled from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been made irrelevant, and continues to ignore the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who make up an expanding underclass (see Reichardt's next film). Meanwhile, a chasm grows between the slogans, rhetoric and buzzwords of liberal values - which bear no relation to reality, have no influence on power and exude a tepid idealism completely divorced from daily life - and the predatory schema these liberals actually serve.

And so while Kurt pines for an idealised, simpler time - a time when he and Kurt were friends on the way to a better tomorrow - he is ultimately able to offer nothing but confused, half-thought out, hollow rhetoric. Reichardt paints him as a man neutered and sexless. Mark views his friend with a mixture of pity and sadness, but knows that he is no better.

Interestingly, though the film builds to a feeling of supreme melancholy, Reichardt spends much of "Old Joy" tantalising us with the possibility that Kurt may murder Mark or perhaps that some sexual act will blossom between the two. This is not simply a woman's parodic take on male bonding, but a realisation that Mark's world breeds fear, distrust, competitiveness and sexual/violent anxieties. Meanwhile, Kurt's oblivious to Mark's, and his audience's, uneasiness.

Aesthetically, like most of Reichardt's films, "Old Joy" is a work of tremendous restraint. But unlike many contemporary minimalists, who trade in cold, chic detachment, Reichardt, despite the tranquillity of her aesthetic, is able to both conjure up huge swells of emotion and evoke swathes of subtext, plot, character history and motivation from what are very sparse, seemingly bare-bones scripts. Every gaze or unspoken sentence speaks volumes. Only in her use of a car radio – which warbles on about the state of America, a "tactic" which even Altman couldn't make work – does Reichardt stray into annoying, obviousness.

Of course cinema's greatest directors have always understood how to approach ideas tangentially. Say something directly and it is hopelessly reductive. To conjure up complexity, one often has to adopt a kind of proactive ambiguity. The idea isn't to remove explanations – a kind of facile "it's whatever you want it to be" - but to provide the space, and the right semiotic "clues" or "triggers", for the audience to generate the right information itself; to contemplate wider possibilities or truths.

But some kind of distinction must be made between "minimalism" that works well dramatically, and that which works well thematically. Dramatically, "Old Joy" is remarkable in how much it says with its restraint. Intellectually, though, one must admit that what "Old Joy" says is now no longer worth saying. Reichardt's film merely regurgitates the dead-endedness of its heroes. It is as limp as poor Kurt, recalling the same impasse already mourned in films like "Return of the Seacaucus 7", "The Big Chill", "Thirtysomethings", "Get To Know Your Rabbit", "The Devil Probably", virtually every post 60s Godard film and countless others.

Still, while one should demand more from artists, one should remember that this was Reichardt's first major film (clearly conceived as something that was small and manageable), and her subsequent pictures do seem to build upon the work started here.

8/10 - Worth one viewing. For this film without the politics, see "Sure Fire".

I've just finished watching this movie, on a DVD, at home, twice. The first time, I was distracted and only half watching and before I knew it the end credits were rolling, so I used "scene selections" to go back to the middle of the movie and try to watch dedicatedly.

I was fascinated by the fact that there was very little dialog but the gentle music and beautiful photography were very pleasant. I found a certain general anticipation building up, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Surely SOMETHING exciting is going to happen any minute, right? Every movie has a climax..right? Well, I thought we were right there when, after talking about a crazy dream, Kurt decides to massage Mark's neck and I'm not really sure what's going on in Kurt's head anyway...and the camera shows Kurt's hands on Mark's shoulders, very near his neck, then the camera shows a close-up of Mark's hand suddenly going limp ....OMG!..he strangled him...I just knew it...the first thing I thought of was "What's going to happen to the dog now?" (ok, I'm an animal lover and I think that way).....then the camera goes to the Mark's face, his blank,slack, dead face and then I see a tiny quiver of his lips...hmm..ooh..he's still alive...phew ....then they get dressed and drive back from peaceful, wonderful nature to night time city lights and Kurt is alone again, in the city, at night. I liked the movie very much and now I need to watch the first half. OK, not RIGHT now, but sometime.........