Night Moves
Crit
Forgive me for not providing my usual long, exquisitely detailed review, but just going to a movie has already put me one World Cup match behind, so I have to get to the DVR.
But somebody reading this needs to go see this (yes, I'll say that much: a disturbing, quality film) and tell me whether I'm wrong in thinking director Kelly Reichardt needs to fire her editor (Kelly Reichardt). To wit:
- Did I just imagine the ecoterrorists saying that they had a thousand pounds of fertilizer and needed five hundred, rather than the reverse, which is obviously what was meant?
- And when they get in the getaway truck after doing their deed and drive away, are we not seeing a static scene through the rear window rather than the rear projection that should be there?
1 comment:
Maybe I'm just a Night Moves apologist, but I think I have valid answers to your two editing-related questions (both of which I also asked myself while watching the movie): 1) they already have 1,000 pounds of fertilizer, and need another 500 on top of that. I think. 2) could it be that the road behind them was just so pitch black (a reflection of their sudden alienation from their surroundings, as the movie shifts from an environmentalist action movie to a psychological drama) that the background was meant to look static? Granted, it did look pretty odd watching Saarsgard turn the wheel and act as if he were driving without any other indication that the car had even started.
I liked this movie quite a bit, and the point I'd like to stress here is the parallel between this movie's structure, narrative, characters, etc... and that of Crime and Punishment, which feels like a kind of source material for this flick. Both stories are about acts of righteous violence perpetrated by jaded idealists for the sake of effecting a larger social change for the good. These characters consciously choose action over any further deliberation, for they're so convinced of their own moral rectitude, of the general population's malleable ignorance, and of the sheer greed and malevolence of the current world order, that if they don't make a big statement then nobody else will. These folks are thinkers that despise passivity, and when they act, they go all out, even if they don't understand that their actions, when this violent, will inevitably have unforeseeable consequences.
But the real parallel kicks in after the action, after the dam is blown up and the old lady and her sister clubbed to death, when Eisenberg's character and Raskolnikov begin the quick and brutal descent into paranoid chaos. Not too far from where Marlon Brando hangs out up the Mekong River in Apocalypse Now, methinks. Both characters struggle against an irrationality that seems to consume them in the face of committing such a logically planned out act. But when murder is involved, even when it's accidental, people tend to lose their bearings, question the validity of their actions, and go into survival mode in which anything can and must be done, even if at an instinctual level, to prevent one from getting caught. The guilty seem to push that much harder against the world when convinced of their own guilt. Anyway, I'll stop there, but glad you took some time out of the World Cup to see it!
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