Stories of outsiders set in the Oregon wilds, the recent independent films directed by Kelly Reichardt are quiet, unhurried, and sparing with incidents. Their minimalist lyricism and sympathy for nature in the face of ruinous civilisation is the source of their emotional power and political resonance. Like Old Joy (2008), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves is trenchant and unsentimental. As a psychological thriller, it generates unease organically, unlike rote Hollywood suspensers.
Three eco-terrorists prepare and execute a plan to blow up a hydroelectric dam. Farm commune environmentalist Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and spa-worker Dena (Dakota Fanning) – he's a thundercloud of anti-capitalist disgust, she's fatalistic about the planet’s imminent demise – join with Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), an impassive former Marine with explosives knowhow, to carry out their mission with icy resolve. Given the magnitude of their goal, there’s a comical quotidian element in Josh and Dena’s acquisition of a family boat from an old guy and Dena’s attempt to buy, without the right ID, 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertiliser (the volatile compound used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).
Heard but not seen, their success results in an unanticipated catastrophe that affects each of them in different ways. This allows Reichardt and her writing parter Jonathan Raymond to meditate on the ethical conflict between the three's sympathetic righteousness – encapsulated in Josh’s contempt for a society that’s “Killing all the salmon just so you can run your fucking iPod every second of your life” – and its perilous extremism. Frustration, which unites all of Reichardt's protagonists, is the filling station on Josh and Dena's road to perdition. (Jesse Eisenberg as Josh, pictured above.)
Distancing himself from them, Harmon becomes an unwelcoming voice on Josh’s mobile; jittery Dena, her conscience pricked, threatens to spill the beans, which ratchets up Josh’s paranoia. (Her one-off sexual tryst with Harmon may be an unconscious cause of Josh's subsequent behaviour toward her.) Night Moves is named not only for Josh and Dena’s boat but also for Arthur Penn’s bleak 1975 neo-noir, itself a post-Watergate allegory of paranoia and hopelessness in the face of right-wing malfeasance.
The extras on Soda Pictures’ DVD and Blu-ray include interviews with Reichardt and Eisenberg; a short film made by Reichardt’s actor-producer colleague Larry Fessenden; and trailers for Soda’s Lisa Reichardt Collection, which contains the three earlier movies mentioned here and her 1994 debut River of Grass. The latter is a sardonic comic noir in which Lisa Bowman and Fessenden played inept suburban outlaws in Florida.
