Revisiting: The End of an Era in ‘Old Joy’
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Now recognized as one of the most intriguing filmmakers working today, Kelly Reichardt’s second feature, Old Joy, concretized many of the director’s fascinations with the myths of America that have become synonymous with the sensibilities of her work. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006—twelve years after her debut, River of Grass—Old Joy was swiftly hailed as a promising direction for American independent cinema. Reichardt has continued on this trajectory with her subsequently modest yet brilliant films. Shot on 16mm between Portland and its verdant mountain surroundings, Old Joy stars Daniel London and Will Oldham as Mark and Kurt, two thirty-something friends whose relationship has devolved as the years have gone by and their lives have taken them in different directions. One weekend when Kurt is passing through Portland, he phones up Mark, and the two embark on an overnight trip to visit a remote natural hot spring outside the city. The two men’s intentions of rekindling some part of their shared past are quickly dampened by the inevitability of time and how it has worked to change them both.
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
‘Old Joy’ as a Portrait of Its Era
Through the world it captures, Old Joy is intrinsically tied to post-Patriot Act America and the zeitgeist of the early to mid-2000s. Navigating his Volvo through Portland and its wooded surroundings, Mark listens to liberal radio, not entirely paying attention, just employing it as background noise almost predicative to the methods with which we insatiably consume media coverage today. Through the car speakers, the audience can hear the squabbling of left-leaning thinkers as they argue about everything from Lyndon B. Johnson’s role in the Civil Rights Movement to economic stagnation in America. Bookending the film, these radio broadcasts communicate the liberal impotence of the time and the recent re-election of George W. Bush, which saw conservative values and Republican power as a significant focal point of the millennium’s first decade.
While much of Old Joy is filmed in the stunning solitude of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, impressions of Portland, where Mark and Kurt presumably began their friendship, are communicated through their dialogue. When Kurt brings up a record shop they used to haunt in their younger years, Mark shares with him that high rent prices forced the owner to move his business to eBay, and the storefront was subsequently transformed into a juice shop: “The end of an era.” Captured through the film’s minimalist script (which was adapted from a Jonathan Raymond short story of the same name, who also co-wrote the film’s and many of Reichardt’s future projects), this quiet moment communicates powerfully with the Portland of the time, which was greatly transformed during the early 2000s by the gentrification that created the trendy hub that the city is now known to be. Reichardt’s commentary on the evolution of Portland works as parallelling symbolism to the transformation of the bond between Mark and Kurt that Old Joy so skillfully focuses upon.
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The Subversion of Genre and Its Connections to Americana in ‘Old Joy’
After making her first film in her native Florida, Reichardt shot Old Joy in Oregon. A connection to the Pacific Northwest would come to be a leitmotif of the director’s body of work: six out of her eight movies to date have been filmed in Oregon. The dynamic topography of the PNW and its often untouched qualities work in sync with Reichardt’s typically isolated characters and paired-back screenplays. In relationship with the scenic, unmistakably American landscapes Reichardt captures in her films are genre elements that also have deep connections with America’s history of cinema, specifically through both the Road movie and the Western. Both of these genres are captured and subverted through aspects of Old Joy, despite the film being one of the director’s earliest.
Notions of Road movies find their way into Reichardt films, including River of Grass, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and, of course, Old Joy. Each of these movies finds its characters in modes of transition, on journeys to seek out more in their lives. Different from traditional conventions of the Road movie genre, the characters constructed in Reichardt’s work are often left unfulfilled or unable to find what they are looking for due to the constraints of the American worlds within which they reside. Old Joy is no different: Kurt and Mark may initially set out on their overnight adventure with the hopes of reigniting the strength of the bond they once shared, but the more time they spend together in search of the hot springs, the more isolated they become, unable to reconcile with the existential changes they have undergone that has set them on totally separate paths in life. The film’s rather circular narrative leaves its protagonists where they began, bypassing the traditions of revelation typically experienced in Road movies.
Old Joy operates in many ways as a rich response to the Western genre, particularly through its depictions of masculinity. As with classic Westerns, Kurt and Mark have embarked on a journey to locate these distant hot springs, romanticizing this untouched natural sanctuary far away from the influence of the “civilized” world. This expedition feeds into their concepts of themselves as modern men, allowing them a respite to tap into independence no longer afforded in their day-to-day lives. This idea of returning to their masculine roots is quickly trampled as it becomes clear that Kurt’s navigational skills have let them down: he cannot find the hot springs, leading them again and again down wrong turns and dead ends deep within the mountains. As individuals, Kurt and Mark represent contemporary forms of masculinity in distinctive ways. Still, both seem subconsciously insecure about the knowledge that this masculinity exists separately from that of classic concepts of American men, the figures found in films of the Western genre, for example. Mark has a much more conventional lifestyle: wife, house, baby on the way, and a settled existence, which seems to fuel his desire to maintain a connection with Kurt and the freedoms of their past. Kurt is a wanderer, living out of a van with no set career path and no responsibilities. Mark is initially envious of Kurt’s autonomy, which wears off quickly when he again realizes that his friend is just a big talker with no set trajectory, like an overgrown college student who spends more time smoking weed than going to classes. In a prominent nod to Westerns, Old Joy’s arguably pivotal scene finds these two friends sitting around a campfire –– a classic trope, which is inverted as the scene plays out –– where instead of learning more about the world, they almost talk back and forth at one another, gaining no further understanding of themselves, or their standing in one another’s lives.
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Old Joy is an impressive entrance point for any audience unfamiliar with Reichardt’s work. At just 73 minutes in length and featuring a beautiful score from Yo La Tengo, the film’s thoughtful ruminations on the passage of time and evolving friendships are deeply sensitive and unpretentious in the most impressive of manners. Furthermore, Reichardt’s signature sensibilities radiate through in Old Joy, ideas and concepts that the director will intricately build upon in her future movies.