What's happened hasn't helped advance their cause. "There's nothing natural about this," Dena says to Josh. The crux comes after the dam has been blown up, and the unintended consequences have snuck in. Or if it is, that's a tertiary theme at best. But hold up before jerking your knees: this is not an environmentalist movie. Message-driven, polemical films rarely succeed as works of art, too. A scene where she tries to buy-of all things- fertilizer could have been predictable and obvious, but she makes it gripping and suspenseful.Īdmittedly, the environmental message of Night Moves can feel a bit heavy-handed, which threatens to derail the film for the casual viewer. And the performances are understated and beautiful-Dakota Fanning in particular, who's got everything she needs to blossom into the next Elizabeth Olson. It's certainly more plot-driven than Meek's Cutoff, but its vistas of the Pacific Northwest are just as beautiful, worth the big-screen ticket. That said, for what most of us would term a "slow" movie, Night Moves trots along at a decent clip. (You could see this film working well as the origin story for someone like Michelle Williams' character in Wendy & Lucy.) The fallout is swift, severe, and life-altering. The script-which Reichardt wrote with her writing partner Jon Raymond-is, most properly, an intellectual thriller: a story of three people who do a bad thing and must deal with the consequences and their consciences. They buy a boat named "Night Moves" (presumably for the 1975 Gene Hackman film) and set their plan in motion. Night Moves is the film with the bomb, and also with Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as a trio of radical environmental activists who plan to blow up a dam in Oregon to "make people think." Josh (Eisenberg) lives and works on a mostly-off-the-grid organic farm nearby Dena (Fanning) is a rich kid who left college and works at a spa, but bankrolls their operations Harmon (Sarsgaard) is a little eccentric and lives in a trailer a long way from anywhere. And the settlers in Meek's Cutoff battle against starvation, exposure, and death, but also against each other and their fear of those they encounter. Wendy & Lucy's disaffected, down-on-her-luck protagonist gets a small moment of grace from a kind stranger, but is mostly alone, for reasons we don't know. Old Joy's rickety attempt at friendship renewal plays against both the beautiful wild and the constant anti-war talk radio backdrop. There's the shooting and failure to launch in River of Grass. We are discrete units who try to forge bonds to overcome the terror of knowing we are tiny against the backdrop of the universe-but we often wind up hurting ourselves and nature in the process.Įach of her films zooms in on people adrift in the big world as they try to grab hold of something, but usually slip and fall. Reichardt is obsessed with our essential small-ness as humans in a big world. Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg in 'Night Moves'
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