Boys' Life
Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon, and Casey Affleck's Masculine Tragedy
Tools
dir. Gus Van Sant
Fri-Thurs March 21-27 at the Varsity.
Stranger Personals
Say what you will about Gus Van Sant's stint in Hollywood's mainstream. If Psycho, Good Will Hunting, and Finding Forrester failed to inspire the celebrated indie maverick to make great art, they at least forced him to make sense. This commercial courtesy is flouted with a vengeance in Gerry, a maddeningly static procession of stark landscapes and minimal dialogue that ultimately reveals some damning implications about the nature of modern American masculinity--but not before making you want to throttle every goddamn member of the cast and crew. Which just might be the point.
Conceived and written by Van Sant with actors Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, Gerry follows a pair of male friends (Damon and Affleck) as they drive to the outskirts of what looks like a Southwestern town for an afternoon hike. Each calls the other "Gerry," and both use the name as an all-purpose euphemism for "fuck-up" (as in, "Forcing an audience to watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walk around for an hour and a half before allowing anything meaningful to occur was a total Gerry").
Early in the film, the two Gerrys breezily deviate from the designated hiking path-- "Everything's gonna lead to the same place," rationalizes Gerry Matt Damon--then spend the rest of the film trying to find their way back to civilization, or at least some water. In the end, something happens. Then it's over--and the real experience of Gerry begins, as the audience is left to reconfigure every previously meaningless tidbit that's been thrown into terrifying dramatic relief by the Gerrys' final interaction.
For the record, the 90 or so motherfucking minutes the audience spends watching Damon and Affleck walk around isn't without its pleasures. Director of photography Harris Savides has a field day capturing the gorgeously blasted landscapes, and Van Sant, Damon, and Affleck exercise a wise minimalism in dialogue--the most revealing insights into the Gerrys' relationship come from the guys' highly abbreviated lingo, which eschews any hint of exposition in favor of the codified connection of lifelong friends. (In the film's funniest scene, Gerry Casey Affleck launches into a detailed monologue about his progress with a video game: "I conquered Thebes," he mumbles as an introduction. In the film's second funniest scene, both Gerrys repeatedly use the phrase "dirt mattress." There is no third funniest scene.)
Despite these minor charms, as well as the praiseworthy performances of Damon and Affleck, for the majority of Gerry's trek across the screen, I actively longed to be anywhere else in the world. Maybe this is what Gus Van Sant intended. "Holding audiences in their seats: Why is that a filmmaker's job?" muses the director in his production notes, and in this age of CNN news scrolls and seizure-causing animation, maybe it's a good, soul-expanding thing to watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walk side by side for eight minutes straight.
Still, Van Sant's defensive professions of purity can't mask the gaping holes of nothingness that permeate so much of his film. From the arbitrariness of the film's "events" to the long stretches of repetitive motion engulfing each smidge of revelation, there's no question that a stronger directorial hand would've done the film a world of good. As it is, on first viewing, 95 percent of Gerry reads as a work of pretentious laziness.
Until the end. With a conclusion that brilliantly manages to be both predictable and shocking, Gerry closes on a note so deep and dark it sends viewers out with so much to mull over they're likely to forgive the significant amount of time they just spent watching Casey Affleck stand on a rock. Without spoiling anything, I can reveal that Gerry paints an unprecedented picture of the limits of male bonding, in all its terrifying ambiguity. And despite its flaws, we're lucky to have it.
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