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OLD JOY
Directed & Edited by: Kelly Reichardt.
Produced by: Neil Kopp, Lars Knudsen, Jay Van Hoy, & Anish Savjani.
Written by: Jonathan Raymond & Reichardt, based on a short story by Raymond.
Director of Photography: Peter Sillen.
Music: Yo La Tengo, performed with Smokey Hormel.
Released by: Kino.
Country of Origin: USA. 76 min. Not Rated.
With: Will Oldham, Daniel London, & Tanya Smith.

This is a minimalist, low-budget, and politically-tinged take on the genre that’s part of the zeitgeist right now: thirty-something guys struggling with issues of responsibility and growing older. Kurt (played by bearded singer-songwriter and occasional actor Will Oldham) returns to his childhood home in Portland, OR, and interrupts old friend Mark (Daniel London) with a plea for a road trip to the Bagby Hot Springs deep in the Cascade Mountains. We can immediately infer the tensions and implications of why he called instead of coming in person to face Mark’s very pregnant wife, and that’s director Kelly Reichardt’s spare style throughout her adaptation of Jonathan Raymond’s short story.

The silences speak even more loudly than the barely five lines of specifically revelatory dialogue about the old friends’ lives and feelings. We learn a lot more about these two men through their nonverbal interactions, though the differences between them are illustrated by their vastly different memories of a mutual friend – Mark remembers him as irresponsible, Kurt admired his freedom.

Kurt is a time-out-of-place stoner, sounding a lot like a drugged-out character from A Scanner Darkly. It’s no surprise that Kurt’s sense of direction is cloudy. The men become lost. On the other hand, father-to-be Mark is almost too noble a grown-up (in the original short story he’s also single), working hard, volunteering with local teens, asking his wife’s permission to leave, and patiently taking her frequent phone calls. He is, however, more than faintly condescending to Kurt (who does require a lot of patience from the audience as well).

Their search takes on an atavistic, anti-Deliverance aspect as they delve deeper into the Mount Hood National Forest, climaxing at the beautiful, rustic hot springs. (There’s an amusing last line in the credits that the springs does not permit nudity or alcohol, despite what we see here.) Are they washing away their sins? Freeing themselves from their past together before they each move on? Or reconnecting their friendship? Their journey is heavy-handedly framed by Air America rants on Mark’s car radio about the emasculation of the Democratic Party against the rise of the Republican right-wing, implying the political climate forms these two guys as much as anything else.

The northwest scenery is gorgeous, which might be lost a bit on future home viewing, and the sound design by Eric Offin is equally evocative in capturing nature. The local settings beautifully establish the sense of place (the title is seen in passing on a neon sign), and we see a lot of it through the slow pacing, as Old Joy fits well within the road movie genre recently explored in IFC’s documentary Wanderlust. While it is admirably anti-Hollywood, there are only modest slice-of-life insights and no major personal revelations. There is little storytelling or character development to consistently keep our attention from roaming during this bittersweet mood piece. Nora Lee Mandel
September 27, 2006