With the features she’s made to date, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt has established a reputation for being a filmmaker who makes small, character-based movies that are light on plot, slow to develop, and that always take place in Oregon. Old Joy was about a couple of old friends going into the woods to visit a hot springs, Wendy and Lucy was about a young drifter who lost her dog, and Meek’s Cutoff was about a group of 1800s-era travelers wandering through the more desolate parts of the state. That’s it. Simple stories. No further complications necessary.
Her new film, Night Moves, sticks to the recipe pretty closely, though it does add quite a bit of spice to the mix thanks to its story including some tension-building paranoia and the promise of violence. The main characters are a trio of self-styled eco-terrorists who plan to protest hydroelectric power and the damage it does to salmon populations by loading a boat up with fertilizer, floating it out to a dam, and blowing the whole thing up. Jesse Eisenberg plays the closest thing the group has to a leader, a lonely-seeming young man named Josh, Dakota Fanning plays a rich-girl-turned-hippie named Dena who uses daddy’s money to bankroll the operation, and Peter Sarsgaard plays the elder statesman of the group, Harmon. He’s the one who seems to have all of the practical knowledge of how to put together a bomb, and he also seems to be the one who’s getting sleazy kicks from committing acts that are dangerous and illegal. You know, he’s a real Peter Sarsgaard type.
The first reason Night Moves works so well is that the script (co-written by Reichardt and regular collaborator Jonathan Raymond) is just so smart. It’s got a really strong understanding of the three characters who get the bulk of its focus, so it’s able to develop them in subtle and small ways that don’t require big moments of melodrama or lengthy speeches that drag on and on. The viewer is asked to pay attention and to read between the lines, and the rewards we get for paying that attention are a rich story that gets deeper and more interesting as it goes on, and characters who feel much more like real people than those you usually meet in movies. Night Moves is a slow burn, but it builds its heat so consistently that it can put you all the way to the edge of your seat before you even fully realize that you’ve been sucked into its noir-inspired world of inevitable dread, where bad actions have even worse consequences.
The scene where they blow up the bridge, in particular, is a step-by-step lesson in how to construct a thrilling sequence that builds in tension until it eventually becomes a visceral experience that exists on a whole different level than the one the movie started off on. The plan is laid out for us, we get a ticking clock so that we always know how long our protagonists have to get the job done and get out safely, and then we get a wrinkle in the plan that instantly makes the hair on our necks stand up and that causes us to be ultra-aware of just how many seconds have ticked off of that clock. It’s a simple trick, really. You establish the steps of a procedure, interrupt the flow of events, and then force the viewer to sit there in the protagonists’ shoes and soak in the rising terror as everything around them goes wrong and gets increasingly out of their control. Quick editing is the death of tension, and thankfully Reichardt knows to keep things simple, keep things focused, and to never allow the viewer to look away when the situation is getting uncomfortable.
The other big reason the movie is so successful is that Reichardt has continued her streak of finding great actors to work with and then using them in ways that accentuate their strengths. Eisenberg is really good at being tense and awkward, so it’s through his character that we experience most of the fear and paranoia that comes along with breaking the law and becoming a pursued outlaw. Fanning projects a natural warmth and is really easy to like, so she’s the element that allows us to still root for a trio of criminals who are doing very dangerous things that could potentially put innocents at risk. Sarsgaard… what he’s really good at is mostly giving off a creep vibe and looking suspicious, so he’s used to add some color to the proceedings; to make us think that there may be worse stuff going on in this situation than what we see on the surface. Put them all together and you get a sort of emotional stew that’s able to boast having multiple layers of flavor.
Thematically, the film is able to find complexity as well, and that’s the sort of positive that keeps you engaged with what you’re watching while you’re sitting in the theater, and that keeps you going back over everything in your mind in the days that follow. Night Moves is a really simple story—these three people plan a bombing, attempt the bombing, and then live with the aftermath of what they’ve done—but amongst that simplicity are so many little nuances of character that can be explored. Each character is purportedly carrying out this bombing because of concern for the environment, but with a little digging it becomes clear that each have ulterior motivations that exist separately from that. Over the course of the film activism becomes a vehicle for a man who feels isolated to attempt to become a part of something greater than himself, for a girl who’s drunk on youth and ideals to learn about consequences and reality, and for a fringe figure to indulge in his more destructive and anti-social tendencies without appearing to be a complete monster. Night Moves goes to some dark places, darker than any other Reichardt movie we’ve seen yet, so it will be interesting to see if its emotional gut punches allow it to speak to a larger audience than her previous films—which were more dry and intellectual—were able to.
And it will also be interesting to see if it resonates as an indictment of the Camping Gear Industrial Complex that was built in the Pacific Northwest and that has slowly spread across the rest of the country. Somebody needs to stop these yuppies before they get so powerful that we’re all living in tents and eating trail mix three meals a day.
