Gerry

I saw Gus Van Sant's Gerry quite a while ago, when it first came out.

For a while, Van Sant's career had apparently veered away into mundane films, films that betrayed his quirky qualities. Films like Finding Forrester and even the fairly enjoyable Good Will Hunting, but it wasn't the oddness of My Own Private Idaho.

Van Sant then returned back to his more auteurist roots with two films in succession: Elephant and Gerry.

Elephant is Gus Van Sant's take on Columbine. He doesn't take the traditional narrative approach, which would be trying to explain why things happened, or to get really deep into who the characters are, and how their lives were snuffed.

Instead, he treats it as a kind of exercise, trying to imagine, if a bit artificially, what events might have passed on the last day before the shooting, following several characters around, even as their lives intersect at a moment in the hallway.

If anything, rather than sensationalize the event, Van Sant treats it somewhat matter of factly. The events take place. This day was not particularly special.

Van Sant went even more minimalist in Gerry. You have to like films a lot to enjoy this. When most people treasure a plot, a rooting interest, good guys and bad guys, and a heroic action at the end, Gerry has none of these.

Two friends go out into the desert, get lost, and spend the rest of the film, well, trying to get out. There's almost no meaningful dialogue. You're not meant to understand who these people are. At best, you think of what you would do if you were in the same situations.

Van Sant focuses on the bizarre beauty of the desert. He spends minutes on scenes, from the two walking in a strange parallel in the desert, to the shadow and light play as the clouds roll over. My guess is that, because this film is so out of the ordinary, so lacking in plot, characters, everything people want, that it will last quite a time.

After a while, you look for some meaning, any meaning. You look for changes in the sky. The rhythm of the way the two walk. You want to know who these people are, and after a while, you might ask "What am I watching?". After a while, you see the odd, lyrical quality of their surroundings, which serve, I suppose as a kind of character.

In the end, there is a kind of minimalist plot. Matt Damon's character who is dying ultimately blames Casey Affleck's character, and kills him. It appears that he is going to die too, but he somehow walks a bit longer, and finds a road, and it may be that both were so close to living. Or were they? Was the road only there because he did what he did? There's a hallucinogenic quality.

What's Damon's character thinking? Regret? Relief? In the end, you decide these things. Van Sant wants you to bring something of yourself to watching Gerry. The question is whether you're willing to invest.