Old Joy

Kelly Reichardt’s terrific Old Joy chronicles a short camping trip by two old friends in search of a quasi-mystical oasis, the Bagby Hot Springs near Oregon’s Mount Hood. The two actors in this Cain-Abel story inhabit their characters in a way that transcends their blatant types: Kurt (Will Oldham), the slightly paunched post-hippie with the receding hairline, bushy beard, and never-present promise; Mark (Daniel London), the now-responsible father-to-be, intent on putting the Kurt part of his life behind him, but also silently nostalgic for the days when he could, say, protest an unjust war. They’ve gone their separate ways, and are tentative about the new rules of their relationship: their trip becomes a kind of Edenic descent, imbued with an almost Malickian transcendentalism.

Far more than a lo-fi indie riff on Brokeback Mountain or Sideways, the intricately layered Old Joy is in part an elegy for that last cinematic revolution in American filmmaking, the 70s. It’s a male-bonding on-the-road picture, which features the boys getting lost and camping out (see Easy Rider), then having breakfast in a roadside diner: shades of the Oregon-shot Five Easy Pieces without the machismo. Essentially a Cascadian nature film, Reichardt’s work is sensatory and full of room for interpretation; Reichardt throws two kinds of individual freedom together, watches the muted sparks fly, and hopes for some common ground.

Reichardt’s new movie, The Mastermind, screens at VIFF.