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.

                    

Extracurricular studies: An Education

Their meet-cute is irresistible: there’s Jenny, after school, still in uniform, stuck in the rain with her cello, and here comes David, the older, eloquent stranger in his smart little car, offering to provide shelter not for her but for the beloved instrument, which as an unabashed aesthete he can’t bear to see in peril. So the cello gets the back seat while Jenny, for decorum’s sake—she’s only 16—walks alongside as David drives, slowly, gently questioning her, completing the first part of his seduction. A few scenes later Jenny’s in the passenger seat, and the way she looks at David, her vulnerability nearly palpable, her awe eroticized, all we can think is, man, has he ever done a number on her. That moment carries within it an awful lot of what’s initially wonderful and finally disappointing about An Education. Like David, the film’s deft with persuasion but falls short in the way of follow-through.

Helmed by Danish director Lone Scherfig and adapted by novelist Nick Hornby from Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education is a coming-of-age tale set in 1961, with London not yet swinging and Paris still holding its position as the world capital of romantic-would-be-sophisticate teenage fantasy. The film’s beguiling enough to leave you uncertain as to how much power comes from Scherfig-Hornby-Babrber’s collective sensitivity to the heights of one’s first brush with adult thrills and how much comes from the immersive quality of Carey Mulligan’s startling central performance. The actress, now in her mid-20s, is a few significant years away from the heady experiences that Jenny—innocent, yes, but smart as a whip—gets her first taste of, but she registers her enrapture as through it’s all still fresh and undigested. She’s radiant and awkward, a child discovering elegance and sex, fixating while just holding a cigarette, listening to Ravel, or sitting motionless, one hand poised on the dining table while her parents argue in the adjoining room.

As David, Peter Sarsgaard, too, is inspired casting, sleepy eyes, smooth talk, an expert listener, and a pretty blatant grifter to anyone with a decent radar—something Jenny’s parents, played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour, rather implausibly lack. For as long as we sense only the vague threat of David without knowing quite what he’s up to, the film’s delicate and engrossing. A rake he may be, but David’s endowed with remarkable texture and charisma, so that we never feel that Jenny’s malleability is purely a matter of youth, or of movie convention. The problem starts when Peter exits the picture and turns into a bogeyman. The last round of scenes in which we discover the full extent of David’s deceptions are almost laughable in how they compress exposition into flat melodrama, rushing to resolve Jenny’s crisis, which suddenly boils down to a battle between David and Jenny’s English teacher, who's fighting on the side of feminine independence, social legitimacy, and what Jenny cruelly dismisses as the dread life of an old maid. Jenny’s young and bright and has everything ahead of her, so she recovers from David’s whirlwind fairly quickly, but the movie never quite manages the same feat. I guess buy the ending, I just don’t buy its ostensible consolation.