![]() Rich-kid Dena's family is bankrolling the operation she pays for the 1,500lb of ammonium-based fertiliser needed for the explosives and puts up $10,000 (£6,000) in untraceable cash to buy a cruiser, which they will turn into a huge floating bomb. ![]() As Josh puts it, the dam is there "killing all the salmon, so you can run your iPod every second of your life". ![]() His character is another way in which this feels interestingly like a revival of American indie cinema of the 70s.Įnraged by the futile rhetoric of conventional environmental activism, they plan direct action: to blow up a hydro-electric dam, which is destroying wildlife. Josh lives and works at a co-operative farm Dena is his close friend – there may be a romantic entanglement between them – and Harmon is a slightly freaky ex-Marine of Josh's acquaintance, with long hair, radical views and some rather picturesque vocab: he says "split" instead of "leave". Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard play a trio of environmental activists: Josh, Dena and Harmon, respectively. And yet the film is gripping and disturbing. There can't be many screen dramas in which a climactic fight between characters is accompanied with quiet, plangent pan-pipe music on the soundtrack, the sort that one generally hears in the reception at a hotel spa. This Night Moves is like a suspense movie held in suspense: a thriller that behaves as if it is a gentle, indie-arthouse film concerned only with evoking the static beauty of nature. There are traces of noir here, too, but distinctively mixed with something calmer, blanker, less obviously flavoured with genre. Excellent.The title of Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves has a ghostly echo of Arthur Penn's 1975 noir of the same name, which featured Gene Hackman as the private detective hunting a missing woman, and getting into a watery nightmare. It surprised me the way "Point Blank" from this era did. The three or four secondary characters are all of them thin, or contrived to be types, and so it falters. Hackman is the one great actor here, however, and if there's a key problem with "Night Moves," it's that he almost but not quite supports the film alone. And so in a way more watchable today a second or third time. (Beatty is always given too much credit for that film's audacity because he starred and funded it, but the film was Penn's at heart.) This might be called the last of Penn's great cycle from the period, and if not the equal to his 1967 breakthrough, it is in many ways more delicately felt and mature. The director is Arthur Penn, who's great "Bonnie and Clyde" kicked off the shift into New Hollywood sensibility. And that's the lasting reputation of the film, that it pulls off this kind of modernized noir world with originality. These are nitpicks, for sure, because the larger feeling takes over and is commanding. It's not a perfectly nuanced drama in this way. We are led along at times, and frankly told things that might have been better revealed through the plot. Not all of the plot is supported very well. But clarity has a cost, and the movie will take several surprising turns. So eventually the movie is less about who killed who for this or that reason, and more about this man and his quest for clarity. And we see a kind of generosity that is based on this selfish need to do something right, and all its conflicting meanings. And we even feel him starting to get a grounding for his drifting self amidst these miscellaneous people. There are mysterious motives everywhere, and it's only Moseby we trust. The trail for this daughter takes us to the Florida Keys and out into the ocean. It also feels dated, too, making you wonder if it was really so sexually liberated back then. This was for the sake of an audience still astonished that the movies could do such things (they couldn't before 1967) and it's still kind of raw and edgy in a lasting way. The artifacts of New Hollywood liberation are plain to see: nudity (female only) and a kind of sexed up background even when the plot is going somewhere else. He ends up mixed up in a Dashiell Hammett kind of plot, for sure, looking for the daughter of a rich woman and then getting way over his head. Gene Hackman is terrific, and he plays Harry Moseby, a down and out ex-football player with a drained candor that makes him pathetic as much as likable. The hero is a kind of watered down Bogart-not as romanticized, and with less exaggerated one-liners (which film noir lovers will miss but which those who like realism will appreciate). Night Moves (1975) An odd convolution of 1940s film noir and 1970s New Hollywood.
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