Joy Crazy

Interview: Kelly Reichardt

by Sam Adams

Kelly Reichardt is on the move. Just around the block — it's 9 in the morning and she's taking her dog, Lucy, for a walk — but the modesty of her current trajectory seems appropriate to her movie Old Joy, an accidental road-trip movie in which the characters spend much of their time driving in circles.

Conceived and shot in the months before the 2004 election, the movie, Reichardt says, reflects a certain despair in the disintegrating and ineffectual American left. But its roots go deeper, as far back as the split occasioned by Lyndon Johnson's support of the Voting Rights Act, referenced in the quarrelsome Air America broadcasts that bookend the movie. "It's the loss of liberalism, the fact that it's become this dirty word," she says. "The real loss. The old joy."

Read Sam Adams' review of Old Joy. 

Despite the framing sequence, Reichardt never saw Old Joy as a political movie, and sounds somewhat surprised at the way it's been embraced by the left and, especially, attacked from the right. In particular, the character of Kurt (Will Oldham), the movie's vagabond philosopher, has drawn hostile reactions from right-wing critics, less because of what he says than who he is. "The anger has been that someone's even making a film about a Kurt character, that attention could be paid to him," she says. "It really does leave no room for someone like him, no room for someone to live a kind of alternative existence. That's another loss." Reichardt herself spent several years couch-surfing around New York, although in her case it had more to do with the lot of an independent filmmaker than any lifestyle choice.

As much as the plight of disillusioned liberals, Old Joy concerns itself with the mercurial masculinity of Kurt and his old friend Mark (Daniel London), the latter of whom is headed uneasily into fatherhood. Reichardt says an early scene where Mark passive-aggressively wheedles his very pregnant wife into letting him leave to go camping with Kurt was the hardest scene in the movie to edit, and elicited the widest range of reactions from her friends, especially the married ones. "People have come out of it really not liking her, which really surprised me," Reichardt says. "I guess there are two ways of looking at it, although I really only see it one way."

In essence, Mark is a painfully sensitive New Age guy who's defined himself in opposition to the old stereotypes without exactly figuring out what he wants to be. "I think it's about masculinity, and a search for a new masculinity, that they haven't been able to quite find in their effort to not be one thing," Reichardt says. "At the end of the day, there's still this very ingrained competitiveness, even if it's, 'I'm more evolved than you are.'"

(sam@citypaper.net)