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Gerry

2003, Movie, R, 103 mins

Gerry: Review

GERRY
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Gus Van Sant's impulse to balance such career-maintaining features as GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997) with challenging, independently spirited American cinema is admirable, but it's led him to produce weird fringe fare nobody really wants to see. Case in point: this inscrutable and irritating follow-up to the people-pleasing FINDING FORRESTER (2000), in which two young men (played by boyhood chums Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) wander off into a vast desert, lose all sense of direction and can't find their way out — a frightening predicament the audience will soon experience first-hand. Neither one is actually named Gerry, though they occasionally address each other that way; "gerry" is merely a bit of personal Damon-Affleck argot that roughly translates as "screw-up." The mercifully minimal dialogue also demonstrates that the word can do service as a verb, as in, "You gerried the rendez-vous." The two Gerrys were originally hiking along a desert wilderness trail on their way to see "the thing" — whatever "the thing" is, it's obviously not sufficiently important to name — but after encountering a group of hiking moms with fanny packs, they foolishly decide to leave the trail and strike out on their own. The afternoon drags on, a certain menace begins clouding the sky and both decide to forget about "the thing" and head back to the car. Small problem: Neither one is entirely sure where they are, and after a few more hours of hiking, an extreme long shot reveals they're dangerously far from anywhere. Big problem: Van Sant's idea to make a two-character psychodrama without actually bothering to write characters. In the complete absence of anything else to hold on to, the film can only be said to be landscape driven. We have no idea who these guys are or what they're doing in the desert in the first place (sometimes it does matter what "the thing" is), so it's hard to care very much what happens to either one them. The story is based on a real-life incident, but Van Sant claims have been primarily inspired by the work of Bela Tarr, the Hungarian filmmaker who favors 10-minute takes and six-hour running times. But long takes do not a masterpiece make, and the suspicion that the whole thing is a lark is only bolstered by Damon and Affleck's inability to contain their giggles. The sight of them shooting the breeze around a campfire, along with some beautiful time-lapse photography, does recall MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991), but it's a cruel reminder of better days that only makes this film's inadequacies more glaringly apparent. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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