Gerry (2002)

The last Gus Van Sant movie with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck that I saw was Good Will Hunting, and I fell in love with that movie. So when I learned of the existence of this one - a very, very minimalist indie film about two guys getting lost in the desert - I knew I had to at least give it a chance. And I'm glad I did. Gerry is far too sparse in both plot and dialogue to recognize as a truly great movie, but I can't say I've ever seen a film quite like it. The movie plods along in a painfully slow manner for the most part, but then, it's a movie about getting lost in the desert. Not even the woods, like in The Blair Witch Project, where at least the scenery changes, but the desert. The vast and increasingly open and desolate desert. Wouldn't time practically slow to a standstill if you got lost in a desert? There are minutes-long tracking shots that just follow the friends walking along in silence. There is, of course, a fair amount of dialogue, but it's scattered and largely irrelevant, especially toward the end of the film when the circumstances become most dire. When the two actors break the silence and speak to one another, it's rarely ever meaningful. Due to the length of so many of the shots, you can easily tell that most of their non-plot-driven conversations are fairly improvised, anyway. This isn't Lost in Translation or Before Sunrise, and the movie's lack of characters beyond the two friends should not imply a rich back-and-forth between those two guys. There's not even a backstory or history given for either of the friends and we never learn why they decided to go on a nature hike in the first place. The long tracking shots tell this specific story better than any lines or facial expressions or songs could, and that's what made it so compelling for me and kept it from getting boring. Make no mistake - this is an hour-forty-five of lingering silence and very little action. If you sat down with friends to watch it one evening, you'd all be immensely unimpressed. But, I dunno. It made for some fantastic late night solitary viewing for me. It hardly even matters that the duo becomes impossibly lost - that they traverse more different terrain types, and climb more mountains and cross more wide open desert than could possibly exist between the end of a nature trail and the nearest highway. I kind of let it ride as vague symbolism that they started off in a shrubby brush-covered area, crossed some gigantic rock formations, trekked across some desert dunes, and wound up on an endless salt flat in the course of like three days. At this point I'm running long because I might be out of non-spoilery things to even say about the film. There's not a whole lot to it, and yet, I really liked it. Again, no instant favorite, but if you're ever in the mood for something very different than most other movies out there, consider Gerry.