Gerry

Review by Alysa Salzberg
(AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com)

The desert is a thing of extremes. The same can be said for Gerry, a film written and directed by Gus Van Sant, and co-written by and starring Casey Affleck and Matt Damon.

The premise is a simple one. Take two nameless friends (Affleck and Damon) who refer to each other, as well as to anything that goes wrong, as (a) “Gerry”. Have them commit a big Gerry and veer off a nature trail in a very unguarded unnamed national park. Now have them spend a majority of the movie wandering through beautiful but arid countryside, hoping to get back to the road.

That’s all, and in that formula, great things might result. Problem is, it’s not clear whether Gerry is great or really bad. Or what it is, really, at all.

At the beginning of this review, I referred to extremes. Gerry may be one of the most realistic, and at the same time, most artificial, movies I have ever seen. First there’s the realism. Van Sant draws us unquestioningly and immediately into the world of these two friends. We’re given no special insights into who they are, where they come from – like eavesdroppers, all we know about them is what they say to each other, and their body language, etc., onscreen. But besides walking, we don’t hear or see much. Like water in the desert, in Gerry dialogue is sparse and precious. When it comes, it is clever, often provoking laughter, and sometimes thought, as well. The friends’ conversations have a familiarity – I’ve had conversations like this with my own friends, and have heard similar exchanges between other people’s pals. It all rings very, very true, from the cadence, to the inside jokes and shared terminology of people who spend a lot of time together.

Alas, for the most part, we’re left with silence, or almost silence – the sound of the boys breathing as they walk (FYI: Affleck breathes more heavily than Damon), the sound of shoes crunching against rock and sand, the sound of wind, now and then, to spice things up. Only later in the movie, when the boys finally realize they’re pretty screwed, does music come back into the game. Until then, we’ve only heard it in the film’s opening, a very long car-ride set to a repetitive yet soothing harmony reminiscent of a lesser work by Tom Tykwer’s Pale 3.

Still, as films like Zemeckis’ Cast Away prove, constant dialogue does not necessarily a great movie make. But what films like Cast Away also prove is that, if there’s no dialogue, what the viewer is watching should probably be of some interest, and not overly repetitive. And here we come to what is at once the most realistic and the most artificial aspect of Van Sant’s flick. If you were lost in an arid climate for days, disoriented and dehydrated, things would all ...