FILM: "Gerry" (Gus Van Sant, 2002)

As an auteur, Gus Van Sant often proves infuriatingly elusive, as humourlessly single-minded in his pursuit of aesthetic divinity as he is content to churn out the likes of Finding Forrester and then lampoon himself as a money-grubbing sell-out (see the hilarious Good Will Hunting parody in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). However, in recent years he seems to have made peace with his more stubborn artistic aspirations and found his true voice as a film-maker - a process that arguably began with this oddity. Gerry continues Van Sant’s preoccupation with the plight of young men in crisis, a theme which heavily informed his earlier films Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting. The set-up is simple but deliciously ambiguous: Matt Damon and Casey Affleck play two hikers who drive into the desert in search of an anonymous landmark, but quickly become lost and are forced to traverse the arid landscape for days without food or water in the vain hope of rediscovering their vehicle. Gerry is the name of both characters; it is also slang for a change in direction - a wrong turn. Given these circumstances, were they not doomed to disorientation even before they set out? Indeed, placed in a context of barren vacuity with no clear indication of where they came from or what they were hoping to achieve, were both men not already lost?

If your idea of a film revolves around such vagaries as plot, excitement and incident, you’re advised to stay well away. Despite ostensibly conforming to a linear narrative (the protagonists must find their way home), the closest Gerry comes to any kind of event is an entertaining scene in which Affleck is stranded on a large rock and Damon attempts to construct a makeshift dirt-pile to cushion his fall. For the most part though, nothing really happens and each shot seems to last an age, tracking alongside the characters with eerie fluidity as they continue their hopeless quest.


Gerry is an abstract road-movie of sorts, though at heart it is a conceptual piece which owes more to Samuel Beckett and real-time film-makers like Béla Tarr than the traditions of its immediate genre. It is perhaps best taken as a film about solitude; a quiet portrait of individuals alone with their thoughts. Worse perhaps for them than being stranded, the terrain represents a direct representation of their own condition: a literal and emotional blank. Van Sant’s expansive vistas offset his protagonists’ increasing sense of isolation and despair with quiet detachment, lingering on each landscape with a soporific indolence that displays as much reverence for the beauty of the scenery as it does despondence at its impenetrable vastness.


Against a backdrop of such overwhelming desolation, the characters become mere ciphers. One inordinately long shot shows the pair trudging side-by-side while the camera’s focus racks slowly between them; the only sound we hear for several minutes is the dull crunch of their footsteps against the gravel. Damon and Affleck’s low-key, largely emotionless performances are so minimal as to be ultimately complimentary, bringing an additional metaphysical dimension to the proceedings that begs the question: are they in fact the same person? Is the film’s climax (in which Damon smothers Affleck on a white salt-plain after he weakly whispers “I give in”, only to be rescued and find himself even more isolated on the road to home that he so desperately craved) an epiphanous rite-of-passage or simply the logical conclusion to their misadventure?


The stylistic template for many of Van Sant’s recent films, be they impressive (the wonderfully transient Elephant, for which this can be seen as a trial-run) or faintly irritating (Last Days, his rambling speculation on the final hours of Kurt Cobain), Gerry is a divisive but rewarding watch, less of a conventional piece of entertainment than an overall experience which relies more on the cumulative effect of composition, camera movement and pace than actual narrative thrust. It’s not entirely successful – it’s difficult to say whether there’s any real philosophical depth behind the deliberately open-ended conceit’s barren surface – but it’s certainly a haunting piece of work that lingers long in the memory after the final credits have rolled.