Both of them are unhappy with the status quo and seek to change it, and it’s not as if the film belittles their aspirations: the worst you can say about them at the beginning is that they’re impatient, which might also be a virtue in the face of widespread, rapacious, environmentally ruinous corporate practices. Introverted commune-dweller Josh could be a younger, more stringently ideological version of Old Joy’s counterculture warriors, while Dena’s little-girl-lost act resembles Wendy in Wendy and Lucy (the difference being that she seems to have taken a little bit of money with her on her way off the grid). In terms of its characters, Night Moves isn’t all that different from Reichardt’s earlier films. Reichardt is not a shrinking violet, and in scene after tightly ratcheted scene, her direction proves equal to the late-blooming hothouse atmosphere of the script (which she wrote with her regular co-writer Jonathan Raymond). Yet leaving aside the fact that Reichardt’s films have increasingly come to play with generic conceits – the road-movie-without-a-car set-up of Wendy and Lucy (2008), the western-without-a-cowboy premise of Meek’s Cutoff (2010) – framing the filmmaker’s delicacy as a handicap seems an unfair (and not so subtly gendered) criticism. The common complaint was that this congenitally understated director simply wasn’t able to handle the heightened narrative stakes that went along with producing a pure genre exercise – in this case, a thriller containing murderous threats, narrow escapes and even a cat-and-mouse stalking sequence (maybe the most unexpected neo-neorealist detour since the Dardennes put a car chase in L’Enfant). When the film debuted last autumn in Toronto and Venice, it was the second half that seemed to rankle even those critics sympathetic to Reichardt’s work. This passage comes almost exactly midway through Night Moves, and it effectively slices the movie into two pieces: the planning and execution of the bombing, and its fallout, which has severe and violent consequences for the group. As positioned just so by Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, the characters aren’t just running on empty – they’re also going nowhere fast. Their car’s rear window is occluded by a piece of tarp, so that even though the bobbing of their bodies and the gliding momentum of the sound design tells us that they’re on the road, there’s no clear indication of forward progress. This is arthouse filmmaking 101, the impassive face as the gateway to the tortured soul, etc.īut the real meaning of the image has been pushed all the way to the back of the frame. Driving away from the hydroelectric dam they’ve just partially blown up via a payload of homemade explosives, eco-radicals Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning) and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) sit in stony silence, framed in a static three-shot that lets us study their faces for traces of anxiety or triumph.
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