It is difficult to imagine two young men less suited to a wilderness hike than the two guys named Gerry in the Gus Van Sant film entitled Gerry. It is also impossible to imagine a less Hollywood movie made by a major American filmmaker.
In both cases -- the Gerrys and Van Sant -- the people involved are courting disaster, the two young men because of their poor decisions, Van Sant because he has made a minimalist film in which the landscape is the strongest character.
As co-written (with director Van Sant) and played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, the two Gerrys are naive idiots who do stupid things.
Things go wrong early, at the trailhead of a desert hiking path located in the U.S. southwest (the shoot was actually split between Salta, Argentina, and sites in Nevada and the forbidding Death Valley of California).
Equipped for nothing more arduous than a walk across a lawn, the two goofs set out. They are laconic, almost silent. When they do speak, the content is devoid of any depth and rarely any real emotion. They are very nearly inarticulate.
Even their objective on the hike -- referred to as "the thing" -- is a mystery and of no consequence. They give it up quickly. No surprise, they also get lost -- hopelessly, dangerously lost!
What happens over the next three nights and four days is a struggle for survival. They have no water, no equipment and absolutely no common sense. They wander across scrub desert, up rocky slopes, through canyons and into a vast, shimmering salt flat that threatens to kill them.
So it is wrong to suggest that "nothing happens," as many have in describing this film, which made its Canadian debut at the 2002 Toronto filmfest. Plenty happens, just not in the usual action narrative sense of most Hollywood movies.
What also happens is that Van Sant, inspired by such filmmakers as Bela Tarr, James Benning, Chantal Ackerman and Andrei Tarkovsky, shoots the "events" of Gerry as a small part of the physical landscape. Waves of images depict stormy, ever-changing skies, brisk blasts of wind, blinding sunlight or the gloom of nightfall. The staggering beauty of the wilderness is set in contrapuntal rhythm with the staggering banality of the two Gerrys as they become more dispirited, more disoriented.
Occasionally, Van Sant and his brilliant cinematographer, Harris Savides, set a scene that is so pure and so achingly beautiful you want to cry just watching it. The best example is a closeup of the faces of Damon and Affleck as they walk in unison for what seems forever across an enormous expanse of flat land that allows them to maintain a steady pace.
Other times, the movie is so tedious you want to scream just enduring it. Van Sant lacks the ethereal genius of the Italian minimalist master Michaelangelo Antonioni, although some pundits have invoked memories of The Passenger (1975) in discussing Gerry. There is just as much of L'Avventura (1960) here. Either way, Van Sant is fooling around, however creatively, but he is not making the great art of an Antonioni.
(This film is rated AA)
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