Kelly Richardt made this film in 2006 and sort of challenged Gus van Sant’s take on Oregon as film muse.
The film is maddeningly atmospheric. It’s like the visual equivalent of “aural wallpaper” The viewer is literally staring out the window for 15 percent of the film. And Yo La Tengo keeps the soundtrack so understated that we aren’t really able to stray too far metaphorically from the literal view.
Maybe I’m thinking about vanSant because he is a gay filmmaker and Old Joy is, if not a homosexual film, then certainly homosocial. Will Oldham’s character is a little bit Buck from Chuck and Buck and a little bit like Sal Mineo’s character in Rebel Without a Cause.
It’s hard to understand a character like this one unless you’ve met someone like him before. His intensity is stark and raw, perhaps in a way we’d all like to feel sometimes. But it’s also on the edge of delusional.
In Old Joy, this character is named Kurt and he and his friend Mark go on a short camping trip to an isolated hot springs in the forest outside of Portland. The two men seem out of step with each other from their first interaction. When Mark drives to pick up Kurt from his house, Kurt is off somewhere collecting a cooler and some other junk for their trip and Mark sits on the porch wondering if his friend will show up at all. Mark also has a pregnant wife and in the brief glimmer we get of their relationship, the two seem stressed and sad.
When Kurt does show up, he seems shy and beholden to Mark. We learn later that the two were old roommates but that relationship seems far away now. When these two men meet again, they are rediscovering each other with very tentative probings. On their first night out camping, Kurt gets really drunk and the true nature of his feelings for Mark come out. To say that he loves Mark is accurate. But that love is not an easy categorical love. It seems explosive in every direction–will Kurt kiss Mark? Kill him? rape him? Is he crazy, or just lonely and lost? Will Oldham bring out Kurt’s character so fully with so little dialogue. It’s really incredible that he is able to pack such a short film (111 minutes!) with so much subtext.
But he also conveys a lot physically. There are these moments when Kurt looks at Mark with something slightly more evil than longing. In the culmination of the film, when the two have reached the hot springs, stripped down and entered there separate tubs, Kurt (after getting out to smoke a bowl) crouches behind Mark and begins massaging his shoulders. Mark tenses up and Kurt tells him to relax. The camera focuses on Mark’s hand, which starts out tightly gripped around the edge of the tub and slowly loosens and sinks into the water. His wedding ring eerily prominent. His hand limp like a dead man’s. He’s given in to Kurt and maybe it was the right thing to do. But his giving in also seems tainted because we can see that he thinks Kurt is off his rocker and when he lets Kurt take control of him, physically, it’s like he’s going against his better judgement.
At the center of Old Joy is the tension of life lived deliberately versus life lived passively as a witness. I would also add that the film uses the buddy (homosocial) relationship to reveal the difficulties of male bonding in our society. This film could never have been made about two women. Women are allowed to be physically close to one another to a much greater degree without things getting “weird”.
Leave a Reply