Old Joy: When Old Friends Fade

 

OLD JOY (2006)

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Washington Square Films, 76 minutes, not rated (brief dorsal nudity)

★ ½ 

 

 

 

 

Films in the Criterion Collection are usually quality offerings, but not always. I recently saw Old Joy, a Kelly Reichardt offering. She is known for independent movies that are conceptually intriguing. The final products, though, blow hot and cold. ( Meek’s Cutoff is my favorite from her.)

 

Old Joy came two years before Reichardt made her most celebrated movie, Wendy and Lucy. Lucy the dog is also in Old Joy and I exaggerate only slightly when I saw that the pooch has more affect than the two human principals. Mark (Daniel London) is on the eve of fatherhood, when he gets call from old friend Kurt (Will Oldham) wanting to know if he wants to go on a weekend camping and hot spring road trip. It is inferred, though never spelled out, that Kurt is troubled in a mildly depressed manner, but Mark could use a little time to wrap his own head around the change coming in his own life. His wife tells him to go, so he packs the car and takes Lucy along for the outing.

 

Old Joy was made in Oregon. Mark agrees to drive as everything about Kurt, including his rented apartment, his van, and his personal appearance bespeak the term bedraggled. They set up for the Cascades, smoke weed, and get lost a few times, but neither is what you’d call a great conversationalist. They end up spending the night in a tent at the end of a road where household junk has been strewn, find a diner the next morning, get directions, hike into Bagley Hot Springs, soak in the springs (with a bit of ambiguous neck rubbing from Kurt), head back to the city (Portland?), and say their goodbyes. That’s it. The movie is just 76 minutes long but its pace is so labored and lugubrious that it had to stretch to break the one-hour mark. There are several mostly wordless driving POV shots whose major purposes are to emphasize the lack of connection between Mark and Kurt and to spotlight a rather subdued soundtrack from Yo La Tengo.

 

I get what Reichardt wanted to do. Most of us probably have people from our past with whom we were once close. Reunions usually go one of two directions. In the best case scenario it’s like picking up a discussion that began decades earlier as if we were interrupted just yesterday. The sadder result is the realization that the two of you have gone down different paths and there’s no spur road that reconnects them. The title Old Joy says it all. Kurt reminded me of a burnt out Deadhead who thinks that the next hit, song, hot spring, or Burning Man–there’s an oblique reference to it–will resuscitate the sweet bird of youth. Reichardt uses postindustrial physical decay, tired diners, and litter to underscore how the friendship between Mark and Kurt is past its sell-by date. In the end, like Mark we observe that things are old, but not joyful.

 

Old Joy is ultimately a sad film, but it’s simply not a very interesting one. Despite the expanse of the mountain ranges and the lushness of the Pacific rainforest, the movie is claustrophobic. I’m at a loss to see why some critics called it one of the best films of 2006, or why it ended up in the Criterion Collection. Lucy was delightful, though.

 

Rob Weir