Old Joy and Pan’s Labyrinth
Old Joy, 2006. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, written by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond. Starring Daniel London and Will Oldham.
Now showing at the Oak Street Cinema.
Old Joy begins with a phone call between friends. Mark (Daniel London) is seen talking with his old college pal Kurt (Will Oldham) about a last minute camping trip. The conversation is awkward, a discussion between two people whose relationship, you already notice, is on the wane. Mark wants to take the trip, but why? Well, perhaps it is because he needs a break–a hiatus from his pregnant wife (who wonders about this mysterious friend from her husband’s past), from his job, from his life. Mark is a man about to take a very important journey into fatherhood. He is lost, and needs to get grounded again.
Old Joy is about nothing more than a camping trip between two friends, a pair of men who met in college and had an intense friendship, of long talks and shared observation, and have since watched, baffled, as their lives divided on the road to adulthood. In the hands of Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy is a quiet, ruminative film, a small blessing for those of us battered by CGI and Big Events on the big screen, soundtracks blaring and actors strutting. Here, you walk with her characters through the Oregon forests, you listen to their quiet admissions, stare at the trees and the sky. Like a hike with a good friend, you come away refreshed, and perhaps a bit frustrated that life is not always this calm.
Kurt promises his friend Mark that there is a hot spring nestled in one of the old growth forests in rural Oregon. They drive. Along the way, they talk, just as old friends do. And Reichardt subtly, so subtly, gives us the details of these two friends: Kurt is a wanderer, utterly confused about the world he lives in, trying to figure out how to survive. He wants life to reflect the beliefs he developed in college. Mark has embraced the rush to adulthood. He has a child on the way, political talk radio fills his car–and he is the one who has the house, who has the car that runs, whose possessions don’t fill an old beaten-up van.
Kurt has lost his way literally at first, missing an overgrown path that leads to the spring. Mark shows his frustration, calling his wife, complaining to her and lying to Kurt about his anger. Unable to find the springs, they spend their first night sleeping on an old abandoned couch in the woods, watching the embers from their fire climb into the clear night sky. They talk–about nothing, and about everything.
Next morning, over breakfast, another call home, some reassurance, and then they light out and actually find the springs. Here, Kurt is in complete control, in his element, and the scenes are just beautiful, and moving. Reichardt’s camera is never intrusive, low to the ground, weighing down these scenes with a sweet gravity that we’ve all enjoyed on trips with close friends. The men relax, profoundly, and Kurt massages his friend’s shoulders, in a scene so fraught with tension–and it’s really not sexual–you’ll find yourself reeling.
Old Joy might try your patience. If you dislike the characters, you won’t like the movie at all. But if you can embrace them, as I did, recognizing yourself and your friends in both, then you will be rewarded with a powerful experience. Neither character is given short shrift here–Kurt eventually finds the springs, and he was right, they are a transcendent experience. Mark has his feet more firmly planted on the ground, and in the city, at the end, we see that he is right back in control. Kurt is lost. He will always be lost.
And perhaps that is the most heartbreaking thing about this movie, the inevitable loss of this friendship. Undoubtedly, these two will attempt to keep in touch, but they will drift. They have different lives, utterly different, and they need one another desperately. Mark’s more button-down world must have the release a trip with Kurt provides. And Kurt needs someone to help him maneuver the modern world. But these never last. Who among us doesn’t have that friend who seems to be a bit wild, too lost in this world, who won’t settle down? We travel down our road, and eventually stop seeing the landscape, the stars, or the water that rushes beneath the bridge. We scoff at those who stare, just as those who stare and wonder scoff at us for continuing to struggle, making a living and settling down. Reichardt understands there is magic in both worlds, and the division between the two is a matter of pure heartbreak.
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El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), 2006. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Ivana Baquero, Adriana Gil, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Alex Angulo, and Doug Jones.
Now showing at the Uptown Theater.
Briefly: If your children can endure a couple of scenes of violence, then Pan’s Labyrinth is an almost perfect fable for the young ones. This is the story of a little girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, simply marvelous) who is shuffled off to a remote military outpost, where her pregnant mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) who is newly married to the vicious Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez–as complexly evil as Ralph Fiennes was in Schindler’s List). The girl falls deeply into a fantasy world, where she must perform three dangerous tasks in order to return as the princess of the underworld.
A friend told me that one of his colleagues was disappointed in the lack of magic in this film. Unfortunately, what was meant was that there is a lack of Narnia overkill–Pan’s is not the ticket for the hordes of fantasy fans everywhere seeking monsters and battles and fairy dust. True, Pan’s Labyrinth, like Del Toro’s Devil’s Backbone before it, has little CGI–you get most of it in the previews!–but it is rich with characters, plot, and metaphor. And it is sad, and hardly triumphant. But it will make you think; it will make your children think. Perhaps they will emerge shaken, and have bad dreams. And you might just have to talk them through this, have to use this little story to help them to understand this big, often cruel and beautiful world. You will have to wrestle with their curiosity, and their difficult questions. Is that so bad?
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