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"Old Joy" is a thoroughly boring and uninteresting art project that aims for something deep but only gives us the surface. A single note of a film -- a friendship challenged by life's inevitable changes is renewed, however awkwardly, in the wilderness -- "Old Joy" fails at transforming a short story into a feature-length movie.
Director Kelly Reichardt lazily hopes to substitute long, digressive shots of cars driving around aimlessly for more complicated and resonant meditations on loss. Dan London is horribly miscast as a husband and expectant father who ventures out for a "guys only" camping adventure with an old but neglected friend. His nearly speechless performance never achieves a sense of credibility. Will Oldham is believable as a post-hippie slacker/ stoner/loser who seeks to reconnect with his friend, but his pot-addled ramblings only hint at whatever heartache he may have suffered. Precious little happens in this film; Reichardt tries to focus on the music between the notes, but the effort comes off as nothing but artifice. Even the excellent, melancholic music by Yo La Tengo fails to assuage the viewer's tedium and frustration with this movie going nowhere. "Old Joy" could easily have been condensed, and given much greater resonance in the process. The message of the movie is so easily discerned that at it's present running length, the film is stultifying in its pretentiousness.
To be fair, there is a second level of meaning in the movie. The film is bookended by driving scenes wherein a liberal talk radio station plays loudly, drowning out all other background noise. The on-air discussions of the Democrats' missed opportunities during the presidency of George W. Bush serve as an indictment of the younger generation represented by our two near-middle-age slackers in the movie. However this indictment is leveled obliquely and clumsily. The note is exceedingly trite: only through remaining connected to people in our own lives can we hope to function as a community. That kind of simpleminded formulation may win over the college crowd, but it's a cheap dime-store metaphor.
score 3/10
chomsky-43 15 October 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1497545/ |
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29-11-2019 05:35:44