Reichardt: Night Moves (2013)

Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is about a trio of activists, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard, who develop a plan to blow up a hydroelectric dam in northern Minnesota. Their agenda is radical or old-fashioned depending on how you look at it, since it basically involves wresting enviromentalism away from any rhetoric of sustainability or renewability, let alone the grassroots activism, New Age idealism and prepackaged wilderness experiences that seem to suffuse their local community. Yet what makes the film so powerful is that their own gesture doesn’t feel any less minor or impotent, if only because it sets out to alleviate what already appears to be a dead planet, a series of drowned river valleys and desiccated, deforested slopes, a world in which epiphanies are relegated to the remotest distance, transformations spun out to the thresholds of audibility. Reichardt’s austere minimalism has never felt so naturalistic or atmospheric as it does here, if only because there doesn’t seem to be quite enough nature left for naturalism anymore, nor quite enough atmosphere for fully-fledged atmospherics. Perhaps that’s why the film feels so prescient of every particle of atmosphere that does still exist, dipping in and out of some of the most atmospheric genres to give itself room to breathe, even as the characters seem to suffocate in their own endless introspection – as much as they’re all working together, they’re also pursuing their own solitary, inscrutable trains of thought, opening up great chasms of psychic space that Reichardt only chooses to contour in the most provisional, incidental way. As a result, you never get to know them any more than they get to know each other, which makes you feel quite complicit, more suspensefully involved than you might be with more conventional characters or characterisation. Like the 1975 film of the same name, they take us to the edge of America, and take us there by water, or at least take us to where borders and boundaries start to become watery, liquid, ambient. We may be halfway across the Lake of the Woods, rather than the Gulf of Mexico, but there’s the same sense of an endless, exhausted continent stretched out somewhere behind us, attenuating any resistance or representation of resistance that the film might leave in its wake.