Indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has made a career out of the saying “Wherever you go, there you are.” A naturalist at heart, she observes her characters intently as they roll into new environments, size up their surroundings, and try to conquer them. Her breakthrough film, Old Joy (2006), follows two old pals on a road trip to a wilderness hot spring, where their friendship blooms again, and back to the city, where it withers. Her remarkable Wendy and Lucy (2008) makes a giant statement about economic injustice in America through the tiny story of a young woman stranded in a small town. Meek’s Cutoff (2010) dramatizes the 1845 incident in which a frontier guide named Stephen Meek led a wagon train full of settlers on a perilous journey through the Oregon desert. And in the sadly overlooked Night Moves (2013), scruffy ecoterrorists scout out a hydroelectric dam, disable it with an explosion, and try without success to melt back into their previous lives.
Only the third and last story approaches the emotional force of Reichardt’s earlier work. Jamie (Lily Gladstone), a young woman who tends horses at a ranch, happens into a night-school class in small-town Belfry and falls head over heels for the instructor, Beth (Kristen Stewart), a young attorney from far-off Livingston. In Meloy’s story “Travis, B.” the ranch hand is a man pursuing a woman, but by turning it into a sweet tale of lesbian infatuation in a red state, Reichardt only heightens its loneliness and poignance. More than the other stories, this one exploits the friction between the characters and their environment: Beth endures a four-hour commute each way to teach the semiweekly class, and finally she bails out, handing the class over to a replacement. Jamie tracks her down at her firm in Livingston, but what she wants from Beth is impossible. As in Reichardt’s best movies, who you are is powerfully constrained by where you are. v
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
