Night Moves

With Night Moves, Amer­i­can direc­tor Kel­ly Reichardt makes it five for five. She ini­tial­ly prof­fers a fas­tid­i­ous, Melvil­lian crime pic­ture with spe­cial atten­tion giv­en to man­u­al process­es rather than human dra­ma, but then ele­gant­ly pulls the focus back (with the help of a very sub­tle twist) in the sec­ond half to reveal that the caper at the film’s cen­tre was only includ­ed for context.

The caper in ques­tion is the ille­gal demo­li­tion of a dam which resides on a lake in rur­al Port­land, and it’s a job that’s being exe­cut­ed with the use of 200lbs of ammo­ni­um fer­tilis­er and a cheap‑o speed boat bequeathed the hip­ster leg­end, ​‘Night Moves’. And – to clear the record – though it has no real rela­tion to the Arthur Penn movie from 1975 with which it shares a title, it does have a sim­i­lar sense of ​’70s-style grit, melan­choly and polit­i­cal pessimism.

Again, fol­low­ing in the trail of her exis­ten­tial range west­ern, Meek’s Cut­off, Reichardt refus­es to trade in bina­ry shades of good and evil. In Jesse Eisenberg’s mono­syl­lab­ic Josh, she presents a young man almost mechan­i­cal­ly dri­ven to achieve his goals, a per­son who is wor­ried more about amply mask­ing his inter­nal fear than pos­tu­lat­ing on the poten­tial down­sides of his scheme.

Reichardt also appears very at ease with this mate­r­i­al, even laps­ing into the odd show­man-like edit­ing flour­ish or choos­ing to pay lip-ser­vice to friv­o­lous, can­dy-coat­ed genre mechan­ics. Peter Sarsgaard’s char­ac­ter, a burn-out ex-Marine draft­ed in to assist with the pyrotech­nics, adds some very dry humour to the brew, par­tic­u­lar­i­ty in his ver­bal clash­es with the ultra-metic­u­lous Josh.

Eisen­berg is the film’s bind­ing agent, his admirably Spar­tan cen­tral per­for­mance is as mil­i­tant­ly unruf­fled as Delon in Le Cer­cle Rouge. Yet he always ensures that an under­ly­ing sense of utter despair is pal­pa­ble, if not vis­i­ble. Indeed, Eisenberg’s cus­tom­ary clipped phras­ing and pre­ci­sion-tooled per­for­mance style makes him per­fect for a film about the fact that noth­ing and no-one can attain true perfection.

Yet this as much a film about eco-ter­ror­ism as Meek’s Cut­off was a film about the Amer­i­can gold rush, oper­at­ing as a rich, sui gener­ic para­ble for any and all acts of vio­lence, whether micro scale such as the one chron­i­cled here, or those sanc­tioned by gov­ern­ments with a view to being exe­cut­ed in for­eign climes. The film is clear­ly root­ed in clas­si­cal tragedy, and there’s some­thing notice­ably Shake­speare­an about the man­ner in which the plot coy­ly unrav­els. Dako­ta Fanning’s char­ac­ter, Dena, who makes up one third of the ter­ror­ist trio, even devel­ops a bizarre skin ail­ment as a phys­i­cal reminder of her wrong­do­ing. And this is with­out men­tion­ing the fact fraught and ten­der love tri­an­gle dynam­ic that could well be the cat­a­lyst for all these rash actions.

This is anoth­er stun­ning work from Reichardt. It’s nev­er preachy or polem­i­cal and always supreme­ly refined and pure. What’s so spe­cial about it is that Reichardt attains this boun­ti­ful sub­tex­tu­al depth and hard­boiled psy­cho­log­i­cal inten­si­ty with an absolute min­i­mum of means. And all the while, it man­ages to grap­ple tri­umphant­ly with those pri­mal philo­soph­i­cal notions of crime and punishment.