Kelly Reichardt: Minding The Gaps (Patreon)

Earlier this year I felt drawn to fully explore the work of Kelly Reichardt, a director whom I enjoyed several films from but never considered seriously before in her totality. Given the relative modesty of her career thus far, it is interesting that she occupies an inordinately strong place in the contemporary canon -- none of her films thus far are 'big swings', and their occasional flirtations with genre are never aimed at channeling or respecting the legacy of auteurist westerns or thrillers: her work is unassuming, often deliberately awkward, and never 'sleek' in the way that contemporary films are expected to look -- and so Reichardt's homestead remains quaint, handmade, personal, not neurotic or precocious.

She inhabits a distinctly odd position as an American practitioner of 'slow cinema', a term I try not to use often because of its vagueness, but it is useful here to describe Reichardt's deliberate willingness to use longer takes and smaller narrative structures which go against the standard formal strictures of Hollywood product. She is not on the extreme ends of slow cinema, neither virtuosic like Bela Tarr or plaintive like Hou Hsiao-Hsien -- Reichardt still uses shot/reverse shot editing schemas, and is comfortable modulating her style to suit the 'type' of film she's making, rather than having the style itself become its own raison d'etre.

Discounting her atypical debut feature River Of Grass, which is pseudo-Malickian in a storied American tradition, Reichardt's most conventional film is probably Certain Women, with its star-studded ensemble and tripartite novelistic narrative (is there an equivalent word for short story?), and her most daring is Meek's Cutoff, a movie where the elliptical void between ourselves, the characters, their environment and the languages they speak turns a wagon train expedition into an Apocalypse Now-esque traversal into transcendental territory, a western that feels like a prologue to a film which doesn't exist.

Reichardt's habitual themes of vagabonds, outsiders, loners and thieves place her right at home in an American cinema which has always had ample room for those types of characters both behind and in front of cameras, but her unwillingness to romanticize these people, and instead focus on their precarity, is what separates her from the libertarian-coded ethos of figures like Don Siegel, Clint Eastwood, or John Carpenter -- these isolated individuals are neither 'cool' nor especially unique, they are not validated by competence or aggression. Instead, Reichardt seems to value determination, pluck, and the temporary solidarity that can exist on the outskirts -- all of her heroines and heroes seem quintessentially lonely even if they're partnered-up with others. Jesse Eisenberg's environmentalist in Night Moves is working with two other incipient radicals, but his interiority isn't lionized or condemned, he retains a mysteriously glum allure even after things begin to fall apart for him and his pseudo-friends. And in First Cow, Cookie and King-Lu's buddy relationship seems both based on flimsy hucksterism and an impossibly deep solidarity that destines them to an early grave -- the bonds that human beings form are conditional, for Reichardt, because no one seems to understand one another or understand themselves, and any friendship or love that exists in these films occurs only at the admission that there can't be an union here, yet one wishes to cross that impossible divide anyway, or at least try.

Reichardt murmurs her way through misunderstandings: how Wendy & Lucy's Wendy so easily loses touch with 'normal' society because of her homelessness to the point that her dog seems a more likely candidate for comfortable citizenry, how Certain Women's Jamie isn't able to express her feelings directly to Beth but has no problem caring for the horses on her ranch, how Showing Up's Sean has mental health struggles but they are dismissed by his parents who would rather see them through the filter of their own artistic sensibility -- in all her films, Reichardt cares very much that human beings can be friends, family, lovers, but still not be able to breach the wall that keeps us all trapped inside our egos. In Night Moves, anxiety over apathy inspires a terrorist action; in Showing Up, there is a wish that art can somehow serve as a healing guide for life; in First Cow, the only common language between the different cultures of the west seems to be commerce and violence. In search of a solution for incomprehension, Reichardt doesn't settle for any easy answers, and often leaves her films without climaxes, denying us the ability to summarize life into grand statements or explicit meanings.

Judging her work today, I would say Reichardt's is like the halfway point between Malick and Antonioni -- she has the attenuated alienation and cryptic gestures of Antonioni, but she combines that with the naturalistic looseness and warmth that Malick excels at. Beyond either of them, Reichardt is less formally controlled, less rigid, and less fussy -- her films rarely have 'beauty shots' or impressive vistas in them, they inherit a no-nonsense functional approach that believes in the unitary holism of each image being a reflection of the picture as a whole, to the point where her film about an artist, Showing Up, is about a sculptor whose figurines often are burnt and destroyed -- the uncharmed practicality of creation abhors preciousness, so Reichardt builds her films with sturdy, simple materials. She is an exemplar of a filmmaker who makes no claims that she cannot achieve -- each film of hers is a compelling, benignant and unhurried examination of the daily rhythms of American life, unbothered by cloddish complexities or intellectual incisions. Reichardt selectively rejects the go-getter slapdash attitude that has come to dominate in the American cinema, but she recuses the Emersonian core of it, coming closer than anyone in recent memory to the clear-aired boldness of someone like King Vidor, while also charting her own interests in chronicling history as well as the contemporary moment's move towards atomized subjectivity -- Vidor's The Crowd held at bay a great panic about the expectations of American success collapsing into the daily disappointments of the urbanized mass, and Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy forecasted the post-2008 digital malaise of rootlessness, and First Cow held fast to the hard-scrabble showmanship that would later birth the gig economy. All of Reichardt's films are about 'the now', but the confusion we face is not comprehending or recognizing where or when that comes from, even as it stares us in guise of the people we see every day.

Reichardt's emphasis on simplicity belies an awareness of the ineffable qualities we come across, and her films go to great lengths to show those qualities to us as honestly as possible: a young woman, barely speaking, drives for miles to see someone she barely knows, to be rejected by that person, to fall asleep on the drive back, to then go back to work. So much of Reichardt's stories consist of supposedly unremarkable events, yet she nevertheless insists on remarking upon them.