Customer Reviews

Old Joy

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The political dimension of this unusual film hasn't, I think, been sufficiently emphasized. Both of the central figures, Kurt and Mark, are marginal men, recognizable leftover types from the past century, neither of whom has any citizen's presence much less clout in current America. Kurt holds on to a stale, hip sort of behavior which actually long antedates his own generation's, while Mark, his friend from several years back, is a former hipster, now turned yuppie, a fan of "Air America," married, in possession of a house and with a kid on the way. Mark is converting himself into a work-a-daddy, but he has intimations that something's missing in this recently chosen sort of life. At heart, he, like Kurt, is revealed as still just a boy-man. Accordingly, he jumps at the chance to escape from his house and pregnant wife to try to recapture past youthful good times with Kurt through a road trip to Bagby Hot Springs in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Mere location, as we'll see though, doesn't make much difference when it comes to fostering true human intimacy. One can be as alienated or happy in the beautiful countryside as in the industrial city. To emphasize this, the camera shows us exquisite birds on tree branches in the city and leftover garbage at an otherwise naturally beautiful country campsite.

What these two guys discover on their trip is "the people gap," the awareness that there may be no greater strangers than old friends who've been apart for several years. Intellectually and emotionally, Kurt and Mark have nothing in common any longer; the theme of the film, accordingly, is that of the sadness of time, change, and inevitable loss. The photography, beautiful in its fleeting images of scenery, itself richly underscores this theme.

On the road, the former friends pretty quickly see they actually have little to say to one another. Therefore, Kurt mostly fills time smoking pot, while Mark talks too frequently on his cellphone. Although both men sense the gap between them, the less direct Mark reveals this awareness only through occasional facial expressions. The more honest Kurt gives voice to it. Finally, he senses that physical contact may be the only way to reestablish a link to Mark. This culminates in a hot tub scene of unasked for massage. Mark at first is taken aback by this regression to adolescent playing around, but when Kurt tells him to "settle in," he does, becoming so astonishingly submissive he lets his defending hand sporting his wedding ring sink passively into the tub's water. Exactly what finally transpires here is left unclear, but what is not unclear is that nothing durable beyond the moment has taken place, that no bond of any sort has been reestablished between these guys. Their goodbyes are accordingly pretty emotion free and seem to come not a moment too soon. As a chronicle of time, change and loss, the film is undeniably affecting.

If it has a flaw, I'd say it's a certain monotony arising from the focus on only two characters in an extremely closed situation. Given this narrowness, the film more resembles a lyric poem read aloud than a dramatic action, and, despite the beautiful photography, this makes for a very long 76 minutes indeed.

Mapping the psychic places where old friendships go to die, Reichardt's two-man (and one dog) road picture subverts the buddy drama with its slow, somber rhythm and air of unspoken longing. Kurt, a flaky, pot-smoking New Age type ably played by real-life musician Oldham, desperately wants communion with his more grounded friend Mark, who denies that anything is wrong, though his face and body language tell a different story. Reichardt's poetic evocation of their bucolic surroundings--birds, trees, woodlands--add to the tinge of unsettling melancholy. "Old Joy" might feel slow and plotless to some, but patient viewers will be rewarded by this film's subtle, near-wordless study of amicable alienation. It has the tang of truth.

As kids we all have friends that as adults we no longer have anything in common with other than the past. And we have also all tried to bridge that gap between the then and the now, usually by reminiscing about shared alcoholic beverages, shared girlfriends, and shared memories. This melancholy film directed by Kelly Reichardt explores those feelings of lost friendship and the unrelenting nature of passing time. The simple tale involves two old friends, now on much different life paths, who decide to spend a weekend together in the woods. Reichardt directs "Old Joy" with a slow hand that has no interest in posing for you or winning over your approval. She also has no ace up her sleeve even though I, raised on "Brokeback Mountain" and "Twentynine Palms," was fully expecting something extraordinary out of this little trip of theirs. Rather the joy comes from the small things, as in life, such as Kurt (Will Oldham) musing about his overly adventurous trip to buy a notebook and the beautiful nature photography that will make you wonder if we weren't intended to live closer to nature.

As their time together progresses the differences between them become all too apparent. Mark (Daniel London) has gone domestic on Kurt, and that is just the way it is. Of course he has been well paid for his belief in the system, his car is nicer, he actually has a cell phone, and his wife back home is carrying his child. But, as is always the case, he is tied to these properties that force him to lead a lifestyle that is not at all free. The wife doesn't want him to leave, the cell phone keeps ringing, and he gets very uncomfortable when Kurt starts smoking in his car. Based on his choice for driving entertainment (Air America) we are meant to believe that he is at least a self-proclaimed liberal, but standing next to Kurt he looks downright conservative. While he listens to the weighty matters of the day, such as the energy crisis, Kurt is out on the street giving his last dollar to a homeless man. Kurt's world is so small that he doesn't need to know about the energy crisis or Bush's double speak. He just needs to make it from day to day, and without all the modern trappings he is free to do that however he so chooses.

Considering Reichardt's somewhat famous transient lifestyle it is easy to guess whose side she is on. That is not to say that Kurt is given an angelic portrait. His ramblings are long and straddle the fence between incoherent and BS, and he is stuck trying to pull off the look where he has more hair on his face than he does on his head. But despite his disappointment in Mark's decision to go domestic he never criticizes; he inquires and makes snarky comments to the waitress, but is always supportive of what he does with his life. I can't recommend this film however, because it just cuts a little too close to the banality of real life. Why not just go out into the woods and listen to your real friends babble nonsense after one too many beers? My childhood friends became Republicans, businessmen, and weirdoes, and those are just the ones I kept in touch with. What "Old Joy" does succeed at is reminding us that it is far too easy to become engulfed in the here and now, and that a little trip out of your comfort zone every now and then would probably do you a world of good. **3/4

Reviews of this movie are alllll over the place. I've been amazed at the variety of interpretations I've read -- not just on Amazon.com but on metacritic and imdb. Takes on Kurt include: he's the real idealist; he's unable to give up his college-day lifestyle; he's a kind of street saint. Takes on Mark include: he's uptight; he's conceited (?); he doesn't really like Kurt any more; he's given up his idealism, and more. I could go on...but will only mention the variance in response to the radio program, Air America,that Mark keeps playing on the car radio. Reactions to that vary from calling it "Marxist invective" (LA Weekly) to calling Mark is a wannabe or fake liberal because he listens to it!
I finally decided that the non-obvious, not-spelled-out, low-dialogue qualities of this film allow people to project onto it whatever is on THEIR minds. That being said, here's what I thought -- and felt:
The salient feature of this film is its hyper-realism. We are accustomed to Hollywood flicks in which the world is a kind of plastic-and-aluminum California or New York urban playground. In Old Joy, though, the world is seen largely from car windows (sometimes it's seen reflected from car windows) and consists of parking lots, rundown neighborhoods, grey skies, tacky restaurants, trucking firms with trailers outside them, and mud puddles. Then when you get to the mountains, the world consists of trees, moss, leaves, water and sky - but also, trash that people have thrown into the forest. I can't say enough to let you know how REAL this film looks and feels. You can almost smell the forest. As Mark is loading his car at his house, his neighbor is mowing the lawn, and the noise overwhelms your senses. Mark's wife is plain-looking and seems to be a -- well, a real woman. Mark himself has quite a schnoz on him (the reviewer who called it "aquiline" was being kind - it's a hatchet blade!) but is cute-ugly anyway.
I suppose this is the place to say that the extremely different looks of the two main actors make one wonder whether the film should be subtitled "The Parable of the German-Scandinavian and the Jew" -- in which the German-Scandinavian succumbs to his hereditary tendency to depression while the American Jew gets on with practical life -- but if I say that, I'm liable to get zapped pretty badly by certain types, eh?
Anyway. My read on the movie was that Mark is a good, mentally-healthy, idealistic person who loves his wife and is kind to his friends, even weird friends. Kurt is a strange-o who doesn't just smoke weed for fun, but has come to really NEED it, and may be in need of other substances as well; he's a loser, and may become a homeless loser before long. He isn't stupid nor evil, but he's directionless and hasn't made the right kinds of connections to make his life work. At one point in the movie Kurt begins grunting in a very bizarre manner which I have only heard from men who are mentally ill (I admit it, I'm a counselor). This is a great bit of acting, but I don't know how nor why other reviewers seem to be ignoring the facts about Kurt - he's a crazy drughead on the way down. To me much of the point of the movie is that a really good friend (Mark) can offer friendship even as an old friend sinks into total lost-ness, and the Lost Boy (Kurt) has friendship to offer as well.
Am I alone in thinking that "Old Joy" is the joy of youth, which Mark manages to remember fondly while moving on, but Kurt tries, futilely, to recapture through chemicals and trips to the woods? Or hey....maybe this movie means something else altogether, such as: People who listen to "Marxist invective" on the radio are actually closet drug nuts themselves. Nope, I don't think that's what it means!

This film captures a remarkable series of insights into the ways we can lose ourselves and become distant from others as we find ourselves increasingly caught up in the commitments that adulthood presses upon us. It captures the experience of moving through places, of noticing silently, and has an atmosphere and sense of place that is rare in film. To be young is to experience the world as open-ended, to see possibilities everywhere and what happens with growing up is the discovery that apparent possibilities are not real, and the creation of obligations that come with taking up projects of any sort: to get a job or to get married or to make plans is to bind oneself in ways to a future that begins to take upon itself the air of inevitability. Mark is married, about to become a father, but still feels the longing to connect with an open-ended past, with a once-close friend, with a nature that does not confine. Kurt, who tells Mark that he admires him for his impending fatherhood, since he has never made a commitment that he couldn't retreat from, apparently has no job and is on the brink of losing his apartment -- and yet can't bear to lose a friend as well and wants to go on a trip to recover some of the intimacy of a connection with someone who once understood him. The film captures the nuances of their relationship and of their similarities and differences very precisely, and with unflinching honesty. The excitement of getting away for a weekend with a friend in a beautiful place is contrasted with the boredom of having next to nothing to say and the muted annoyance that comes when Kurt can't find his way and they get lost. It is a meditative film, almost poetic, and could be tedious for someone expecting a series of plot-driven revelations. This is the kind of film in which the profound and defining moments (a brief connection when the two friends arrive at the hot springs) are played with great subtlety and are able to have the weight that they do because so much else is understated. Much is told here by gestures, hand movements, postures, and images of nature. In that sense, the film resembles work by filmmakers such as Dreyer and Bresson and especially Ozu (or Kiarostami) -- who have been described (by Paul Schrader and others) as working in a "transcendental" style that emphasizes the mundane and procedural and mute and understated and alienated moments so that the experience of connection and joy can stand out without artifice.

We expect films about old friendships to show us the great cathartic moment that brings hearts together again. I looked forward to such denouement while watching "Old Joy," a film about two old friends, Mark and Kurt, who seek to retrieve meaning from their past during a camping trip in the Oregon wilderness.

I wanted the story to unfold into the same bittersweet nostalgia as perhaps Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne," recounting the singer's real-life experience of running into an old girlfriend on Christmas Eve.

But director Kelly Reichardt and her screenwriting partner Jonathan Raymond remind us that it is not always so. Sometimes the feelings of the past are truly beyond our grasp as we grow up and evolve into new people. The refreshingly honest film makes this point using the device of a friendship between two men, rather than two women, which adds new dimension to a hard yet truthful lesson.

Definitely not your summer action flick, "Old Joy" is shot beautifully in the Oregon wilderness. A relatively short film (1 hr. and 16 min.), it still takes its time to bring you into the experience. Like a ghost, you really do feel you are invisibly hiking along with Mark and Kurt through flora and fauna, but you cannot open their hearts and bring them together again.

There is a moment in this short little independent film that crystallizes the message: the camera captures the sure but almost imperceptible progress of a slug making its way across a forest leaf with all the sounds of nature as the musical background. From all of the hype that is spread across the cover of this DVD we are to believe that this is the finest independent film of the year, 'shimmering with excellence'. Perhaps for some it will be that.

The very sparse script was written by Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt (who also directs), the story being a couple of days camping trip between two old friends Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham) who have become estranged by circumstances: Mark has married and is expecting his first child while Kurt remains trapped in the hippie generation, meandering through life without direction. The two leave Portland, Oregon with Mark's dog and head for the Cascades where they plan to soak in the hot springs. Kurt is the navigator, manages to get them lost, then recoups and the two spend a night of discussion by a campfire followed by a day at the hot springs: they return home to their separate lives, the 'old joy' of their previous friendship seems to remain in the past.

Most of the 76 minutes of the film is silent landscapes while the two are driving. There is very little dialog and what there is seems strained by the years that separate the once hearty friendship of the two men: it seems we are to believe that the silences and spare words have great significance, but it takes more than a little patience to paste it together into a story. A few gestures are made in an attempt to connect the two again, but they fail to ignite. The acting is monochromatic, the direction is flaccid, but the beauty of the Cascades makes up for a lot. It is a simple, short, plodding little film that may please some and may (honestly) bore most. Grady Harp, July 07

The same year when the likes of The Departed, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine (e-gad!) were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, this quiet, commercially unnoticed film made its way--deservedly so--onto the top 10 lists of more discerning critics, namely the ones who were able to see it. Then again, it's entirely unsurprising that a film like Old Joy would be chucked aside like some unintelligible artifact in this era of attention deficit and mass stimulation. What then can one make of Old Joy, a film so culturally anathema as to seem to beg for obscurity?

In terms of plot, it's essentially this: the tale of two friends, one married and becoming "gentrified" and the other single and refusing to grow up, who get together for a spontaneous camping trip--a last ditch effort on the part of the latter perhaps to stave off inevitable estrangement. The story is nothing at all more than this. The tempo is a pace or two less than leisurely, but in this case it feels refreshing and natural, not overly arty or pretentious. Certainly, it will try the patience of conventional filmgoers, those who like all of their plot points delivered big, broad, and brash on a gleaming silver platter. Fans of bombast or lickity-split editing won't find anything here to keep them in their seats, so the impatient and the unadventurous are warned emphatically against this film; it will definitely seem like a prison sentence or water torture to some... (You know who you are.)

The film is, by and large, a mood piece, like a lyrical poem or a nocturne. Its function isn't so much to tell as to show, and what it shows is the death (or at least the dying) of a friendship and how it affects these two people. Although the story is as familiar as any friendship at all, it is, more pointedly, a male friendship, a genus of human relationship not often dealt with seriously by film. Too often male friendships are depicted as interchangeable, shallow, and situational, but in the case of Old Joy there is a very pressing sense of loss rarely articulated between two men whose contexts draw them in different directions. In this way I found it very cathartic and revealing.

The soundtrack by Yo La Tengo and the evocative cinematography also deserve praise for futhering the mood of this film, which alotgether alludes to the old joys of life we value, miss, and can't quite regain.

One critic called Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" the closest thing to haiku that the cinema ever achieves, and that to me is the perfect description of the film. Very little happens in this short, two-character film; Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), two old college friends who haven't seen each other in a while, go on an overnight camping trip, go for a dip in some hot springs, and return home. Yet the spare, telling details in the screenplay by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, and the poetic beauty of Peter Sillen's cinematography, will haunt you for days. The story wastes no time in explaining Mark and Kurt, or in having them explain themselves; we know from the details that they were college radicals, and we know from the details how their lives have diverged. Mark drives a Volvo, has a pregnant wife and an adorable dog, listens compulsively to Air America; Kurt lives out of a decrepit old van, his only constant companion his hash pipe. (Interestingly, the dog seems to prefer Kurt to Mark--maybe because Kurt is more of a playmate.) "Old Joy" is a film in which the characters' silences are far more eloquent than their actual words, which usually dance around what they really mean. The delicate, sad guitar music by Yo La Tengo sets the mood perfectly. "Old Joy" isn't a film for every taste, but if you're as susceptible to its mood as I was, its last two minutes will send you scrambling back to watch the whole thing all over again. It is a heartrending portrait of lost time, lost friendship, and--at least in one case--lost souls.

`Old Joy' reunites two aging hippie friends going on a camping trip to the Oregon Cascades. Dark haired Mark (Daniel London) has ties to his wife and cell phone and listens habitually to left-wing radio. His ultra sensitive companion, Kurt (Will Oldham) has less difficulty leaving it all behind to wax philosophically about the sorrow of the universe and the good and bad vibes he gets from people. Still smoking pot, he tries to stick to the map, which practical Mark cleaves to religiously for the outcome of their journey. Discovering the healing power of nature, they unbosom to one another and try to relive "old joy(s)." (Never has trickling water--either in film or in real life--contained such healing beauty.) Sometimes profound, at others trivial, 'Old Joy' is a study in contrasts and companionship.