The plots thicken

From the reunited comrades straining to reconnect in the wilderness of Old Joy to the young woman with a dog and a broken-down car trying to move north in search of work in Wendy and Lucy to the desperate homesteaders lost in the unsettled West of Meeks’ Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s characters are restless travelers the lot, folks without homes in any consoling sense, every one an outsider of some sort, marginalized by economics, geography, gender, ideology, searching for a place to call their own in an unfriendly United States. Reichardt herself seems a rogue wanderer in American movies, incorporating elements of familiar genres or styles (the western, the road movie, neo-realism) while largely refraining from generic tropes or token resolution, working with exceedingly limited resources along the industry’s peripheries, even when employing some of its famous actors. Collaborating for over a decade now with writer Jonathan Raymond, she’s favoured small stories in which drama is restrained and political commentary conveyed solely through suggestion.

The trio of radical environmentalists conspiring to sabotage a hydroelectric dam in Night Moves are in certain respects direct descendants of Reichardt’s past protagonists, yet they inhabit a narrative in which the political is now thrust right to the foreground, and Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning) and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) are far more aggressive than their predecessors, steering, or at least attempting to steer the story, rather than letting the story steer them—they are, after all, activists. If you’ve seen Reichardt’s films you probably have some suspicions regarding which direction her own politics lean toward, yet Night Moves is anything but romantic about its characters Leftist convictions. The chilling final act, which resembles a Kieslowski-esque tale of moral consequence, finds self-preservation trumping natural preservation.

Though he’s young, Josh’s idealism seemed wilted to begin with, and Eisenberg is an iceberg, keeping Josh’s inner world sealed within an emotional fortress whose formation may have more to do with frustrations over personal powerlessness than frustrations over the powerlessness of his fellow man or animal. We might start out on Josh’s side, but by the end we don’t want to be anywhere near him or his colleagues, whose myopia, not to mention sexism, belies their ostensible progressiveness.

So Night Moves is no manifesto. It is not about heroism or even good intentions. It is very much about plots, in both senses: the story tracks the hatching of a plot with procedural precision, and the film is by far the most plotted of all Reichardt’s works. Which might make it more accessible to a broader audience and, perhaps, less appealing to longtime admirers of her characteristically austere modus operandi. I’m not entirely sold on the climax, and I don’t know that Reichardt proves herself a master of fight scenes, but I think Night Moves is a smart move for her as an artist, challenging her comfort zone—and ours. There is no one to root for, other the salmon, the forests and the farmers. There’s a pervading feeling of helplessness and entrapment, and it’s earned. Reichardt is one of the finest, most resourceful directors working anywhere. She seems to me incapable of betraying the integrity of her beliefs, and regardless of what tack she takes or how much she bends to genre dictates, she’s not about to let us enjoy a clean getaway.

                    

Paradise lies on the other end of the magic intestine: Coraline

It all begins with a girl and a house. Her parents are there, too, having just transplanted the whole family, but they’re too bogged down with gardening literature projects to even bother unpacking and sprucing things up, and anyway they’re too impatient. There’s also the neighbouring boy, but he’s so sheepishly well intentioned and sort of annoying, and anyway, a boy. There’s a cat, but he’s a mangy old puss that’s kind of falling apart. There are other neighbours who will prove to be genuine eccentrics and sources of diversion, but they come a little later. So what sticks in my mind after watching it is Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) and this house, looming, so empty and creaky and drab, like pretty much everything surrounding it in this permanently overcast, hilly rural Halloween setting.

Coraline and the house are a good match, even if she doesn’t recognize it at first. She’s sly and given to mischief, while the house hides a secret labyrinth. They’re both deceptively compact, she being so slight yet fiercely resilient, and the house, for all its dilapidated grandeur, holds countless inner passageways and impossible spaces. Soon she’ll discover a little door in a wall that during the day opens only onto brick but at night onto this intestinal tunnel, at the end of which is a parallel world where everything seems sort of the same yet suddenly much more fun. Precariously fun. There’s a mechanical chicken that shits out popcorn. There’s a burlesque show performed by elderly acrobats (voiced by the always lively pairing of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) for an audience of Scottish terriers.

Most importantly, there is an “Other-mother” and “Other-father,” completely devoted to their beloved little girl, cooking up delicious meals, showering Coraline with gifts and games, so attentive as to seem almost pathological. They have black buttons for eyes, rendering their every expression of servile joy a little hollow. And here, we sense, is the catch. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch but Coraline’s going to learn it the hard way. In a way Coraline is a haunted house story, built around the protagonist’s ability to identify and drive away the demon spirits.

It would be enough to get just about anything new from Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. His stop-motion animation has such a tactile quality that feels only more enchanting now that so many mainstream animated films fuss endlessly over computer-generated whimsy. His figures each possess unique rhythms, and their transformations are so much more startling for having mass and texture. But the story of Coraline, taken from the novel by Neil Gaiman, is pretty enchanting in its own right, a throwback in the best possible way to old-fashioned stories that lure the magical out of the ordinary. The role of the döppelganger doll Coraline is given near the start is especially smart in that it adds to the richness of Selick’s world and its fascination with objects and the shadow side of just about everything. Pretty fun, overall, and probably ideally suited to kids just old enough to handle a few scenes of extended creepiness.