Getting Old, Remembering Joy
Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy
Within the grainy pictures of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2008), within a version of a city I never lived in, lies an attempt at grabbing and holding on to something that has already left. None of us can keep the sand from running through our fingers, but when you can look someone in the eyes, the ones that have grabbed you and held on to you in the past, and ask “what happened?”, it feels like you should be able to hold on to some sand.
I’ve been having trouble remembering my past recently. I don’t remember my old addresses or the names of my high school classmates, I don’t remember any real details of any book I’ve read longer than six hours ago, and I don’t remember what I felt or was thinking when I first watched Old Joy. Thanks to my movie journal, I can tell you that I first saw it over three years ago. I’ll give myself a bit of a break, because it was March 2020, and there was a lot of other stuff going on at the time. I don’t remember the simplicity of the movie, of its presentation or its screenplay. The idea of the movie is clear, and that did stick with me: what if two old friends, who were always probably different people, took a step or two towards different versions of themselves, a step or two away from each other?
With a crew of six and her dog Lucy, Reichardt went into Portland, her new city of residence, to tell a story of trying to get out of Portland, of trying to escape “life” for a couple dozen hours. Mark, a soon to be father, gets a call from Kurt, a buddy from some kind of recent past, who wants to get into the woods, to a hot spring he had gone to a couple months ago, a place he absolutely remembers how to get to. The story of Old Joy continues to hold an accuracy and a realism despite the eighteen years of age it wears. Mark and Kurt are very recognizable people, trying to do a very recognizable thing. Even in my modern experiences getting out of the city and into the woods of Mount Hood, the feelings and happenings feel similar: tracing your path back to that great off-the-radar camping spot, failing to remember if it was this turn or the next, tracking different landmarks and different kinds of state or national or handmade signs. The use of cell phones – a bane of contemporary filmmaking – still works beautifully here: Mark can check in with his partner, letting her know that, yes, the trip is going as aimlessly as they thought it could and thought it would. When lost and a little burnt out on the present, the phone is a tool to step outside of the moment. That tool has taken on many additional capabilities in 2024, but its effect is the same. More importantly than being a pacing device for the film, it’s a narrative tool, allowing Mark to put on a different mask, or to take off the mask he wears with Kurt, letting us see what he thinks of his old friend, of the place they are in, and of the time they are having.
Kurt is our center of attention here. Not necessarily because he is the “main character”, but because he keeps drawing the attention his way, cutting silences with his stories and ideas. Kurt is played by Will Oldham, an actor and musician, in a perfectly measured “everyone knows a guy like this” performance. Kurt is interested in how you and your family are doing, and he’s interested in catching you up on what you’ve missed since you’ve taken a step back. He doesn’t know that the record store closed, or exactly which way to go to the place he’s leading you, but he’s so interested in you, in an “us”, that you can’t help but give him some of your time and space to occupy. Especially Mark (Daniel London), an expecting father and dog owner and husband, a settled-downer, who agrees, not un-excitedly, to join the adventure with his dog in tow. While two different people, you can see where each might have come from, you can see where they must have overlapped, and you can see where each has gone from those past points. One blows with the wind, the other has planted roots. The two attempt to reach across the channel that now exists between them, through socialization, through inebriation, through relaxation, through space.
I think that might be the operative word here, for this movie, these characters: space. It is created (both intentionally and unintentionally), it is given, it is taken; it is where we linger, it is where we wonder what created the space itself, and it is where we wonder what to do next with the space itself. We make it to plant our roots, and we seek it when we are restless. We create it to co-exist in, and we see others leave us and leave it to enter the vast and nearly infinite space that exists outside of our self.
Kelly Reichardt herself creates and leaves a lot of space in this, her second full-length feature. A film like this can sometimes fall too far into “mumblecore” boredom, too much space and silence provided to the viewers. Reichardt strikes what I found to be a perfect blend of movement and action and space. A sparse score, provided by Yo La Tengo, is dropped into three or four moments in the film, painting the story with a few extra colors, in case we want to know what we should be feeling, rather than being left to fill the entire space of the film with whatever we have running through us at the time. There’s a restraint at play here, in the filmmaking, that lets the important few words of the script lead the way. It’s a simplicity that avoids blandness or staleness. The imagery is lush and saturated with deep and bright greens and blues, a typical, warm Oregon season. We pass by bits and pieces of the city in the characters’ travels; bits and pieces that don’t alienate viewers who aren’t familiar with the specifics of Portland: single family homes and two lane streets and manufacturing plants, things that can be found all over the country. You won’t find the forested gem of the film's final location, a hot spring with wooden infrastructure including manually filled tubs for the springs, and benches to change on, and buckets for cold water to modulate your temperature. The film is a great advertisement for the real springs. Maybe I’ll call up an old friend this summer, and try to poke our way up into the hills, to see what we can find, to see what we can learn.
My favorite moments in the film are the ones in which space is left unfilled, left open. When Kurt finishes a story or makes a joke, Reichardt frequently draws us in to Mark, whose expression is ruminative, almost blank. We know that an understanding, or maybe a questioning, is working behind his expression, behind his eyes that aren’t looking directly at Kurt, or directly at us. Reichardt withholds confrontation and answers, and leaves blank spaces that we have to fill in, for the characters or for ourselves. We end the story with our boys coming back home, whatever that means for them, and the return to a normality, whatever that means for them. Where they go from there – closer towards each other, or farther down their own currently straying paths – is anyone’s guess. But I think I know the answer.
We each become so many people through our lives, each different in varying small ways. I see myself in both characters, here. I feel pity and shame and empathy and joy in both of their actions. As time marches forward, and I march with it, I will enjoy having Old Joy as a time capsule, not just for the city it shows that I’ve since come to call home, and to which I have my own relationship, but also as an example of being someone, both to myself and to others, and how I will leave that someone behind, and some other people along with it. But we can always try to check back in, with ourselves and with our people. We can always pick up a handful of sand, to try and see if, maybe this time, we can hold on to something.
Thanks, as always, for reading. Seeing this movie at The Clinto Street Theater with Kelly Reichardt introducing it, the house packed with 20- and 30-somethings from Portland, was truly lovely. I hope you get out to see something local soon.
For more things to watch, things to listen to, and things to read, I’ll see you soon with what I’ve been consuming, and what I think you’d like. Please, send me the shit you’re loving, any time, via any medium.
TTFN,
Bobby