We are driving a flat, winding, dry and isolated road through desert brush. Everything is quiet. Two young men in a car say nothing to each other. They arrive at a marked "wilderness" trail and head off without anything but the clothes on their back and an extra shirt. With energy and boundlessness they go and go and go. They mention the "thing" that they're apparently going to and how it should be there somewhere. They have no map. The landscape changes, they run, they smoke cigarettes and finally they decide they don't really want to go to this "thing" and they turn around. The shots are very long and tedious. We realize they're lost. The brush disappears and it is mountains, then it is rocks, then it is desert. Then it is night and they sit by a fire. The next day goes on and on and it is unclear how many days are now passing, though the landscape still keeps changing: a lunar surface, and crags of jagged rocks. Their clothes and faces dirty, their clipped exchanges almost indecipherable. They separate and then find each other again, Gerry stuck at the top of a huge rock formation. They discuss him jumping down and the other Gerry makes him a "dirt mattress", which is successful and they keep going. Finally flat white salt is all that's beneath them. They are both barely moving, shuffling their feet like broken-down machines. Gerry, who was falling behind, drops to his knees and lays down. Gerry stops and walks back to him, lying on the ground beside him. After a while, Gerry says that he's leaving and slowly, painfully, reaches over to Gerry as if to find comfort in holding his hand as he draws his last breath. Gerry shakes him off and, his movements stilting and awkward, he rolls on top of him, struggling, not with a hug but with a fraughtful busrt of energy to strangle him. He then lays still. After a while he gets up and walks in another direction, leaving dead Gerry, seeing moving forms on the horizon. We see the vast unbearable landscape move by quickly, no longer within it we are safely on the outside now, in a car. Gerry is sunburnt and dead-eyed, he turns to look at the young boy sitting in the backseat with him, looking out the window.
Memorable quotes:
Gerry: Fuck the thing!
Gerry: Power run to the thing!
Gerry: No, fuck the thing. It's probably just some thing at the end of the trail.
[Gerry and Gerry are both lying on the ground]
Gerry: [softly] How do you think the hike's going so far?
[pause]
Gerry: [softly] Pretty good.
[pause]
Gerry: [softly] I'm leaving.
Gerry: But we didn't see anything that looked the same and we could have just Gerried off in all these different directions.
Gerry: Yeah, but we could have bailed early, you know, we could have just bai... we ma... we... I mean, there were so many just different Gerries along the way...
Gerry: So we were going east, all right, which is a total Gerry...
Gerry: And then we Gerried off to the animal tracks. We went up the wrong fuckin' mountain. Okay?
Gerry: And our mountain scout-about was east, so we totally Gerried the scout-about.
Gerry: What are you doing on that rock?
Gerry: Looking for you.
Gerry: Why didn't you just go to the spot?
Gerry: I did. You weren't there.
Gerry: I've been there. I was just sitting there.
Gerry: Dude, that's not the spot. The spot is like a half of a mile that way. I was at the spot. I was waiting for you forever. I was yelling your name. And I just came walking up here, and I saw this rock. I crow's-nested up here to scout-about the ravine 'cause I thought maybe you Gerried the rendezvous. Sure enough, that's not the spot.
Gerry: All right, my fault.
Gerry: Come on, dude, let's go.
Gerry: I can't.
Gerry: Why not?
Gerry: Fucking marooned.
Gerry: Come on. You're not rock-marooned. Just climb down.
Gerry: But I am rock-marooned. I can't climb down. I'm gonna have to jump.
Gerry: Why don't you make me a dirt-mattress?
Gerry: No, Gerry.
Gerry: Come on, dude. I crow's-nested all the way up here to scout-about the ravine 'cause you Gerried the rendezvous.
Gerry: Well, I gotta haul the dirt.
Gerry: Well, get haulin'.
Gerry: I can haul it from over here.
Gerry: Shirt basket?
Gerry: Shirt basket.
Gerry: I thought maybe you'd succumbed.
Gerry: I almost did succumb, but then I turbanned up, and I feel a lot better.
Gerry: Hey, Gerry, the path.
Gerry: [after several minutes of walking in completely silence] Fuck you.
Gerry: Fuck you.
Gerry: I conquered Thebes.
Gerry: When?
Gerry: Two weeks ago.
Gerry: How'd you do it?
Gerry: Well, I got... I did more than that, actually. I said to Gerry, "I ruled this land for ninety-seven years... and, uh... and, uh, I'd like it." I had all the sanctuaries built. And then I, uh... this hot lava leaked out of a volcano, and half destroyed one of the - my sanctuary to, uh... Demeter, I guess it was. And, um... but I didn't have the... the marble to rebuild, like, the sculptures, and the - to fix the sanctuary. But I already had all these, um, docks, to, like, Calydon and... Argos, and... I had everything. I had everything. Um, I was trading with, like, twelve cities. And, uh... I had-I had a really good army. But, um, the river had - the river had just flooded. And it flooded out, like, four of my docks, and I couldn't import the marble, to rebuild the sanctuary. And she got - Demeter got really pissed off, and so she made my fields infertile. And then, uh... so I couldn't grow the grass. I couldn't grow the wheat, to feed the horses. And there was no... I couldn't... and there was nowhere for the sheep to graze... and the goats. And so my people were getting hungry and restless, and then, um... and so I, I couldn't trade because the - the rivers had flooded. And so, uh, Knossos, one of my vassals, got really upset with me, and, um... turned against me. And they, uh... attacked me. And because I couldn't, I couldn't train any sheep 'cause I didn't have the wheat. I didn't have, uh... I didn't have a, um... a, uh...
Gerry: You couldn't train any sheep?
Gerry: I couldn't train any of the *horses*, because I, uh, didn't have the wheat. And so, when they attacked me, I just got... they just dogged me. And I actually went to send my army out to defend the city, and, like, you can only send 'em out if you have, uh, twelve - if you have twelve, uh, trained horses, and I had eleven. So... I was one... horse... shy... I don't know... of saving the city.
Gerry: So then you didn't really...
Gerry: Oh, I *had* conquered Theb - I had just conquered Thebes. And then that happened
new york times review
Playing Desert Solitaire With a Friend
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: February 14, 2003
Gus Van Sant's bleak, minimalist film "Gerry" is such a radical about-face from his flagrantly commercial movies like "Finding Forrester" and "Good Will Hunting" that it feels like a self-mortifying act of contrition. Having succumbed to the lure of big bad Hollywood and made a bundle, he appears to be purging himself with a project that he has described as a homage to the austere Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr.
"Gerry," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, follows the fates of two friends, young men each named Gerry, after they embark on a hiking trip and end up hopelessly lost in the desert. It is a movie of few words, but even those loosely scattered phrases sound garbled, vague and fraught with a bogus allegorical weight.
The sloppiness is deliberate. The semi-improvised screenplay was concocted as the movie was being filmed by Mr. Van Sant and his stars, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who portray the unlucky hikers. Peppered with profanities, their sparse, broken dialogue sounds like a self-conscious grunge parody of Samuel Beckett, although no humor is intended. As they set out along a wilderness trail, minus any supplies, including food and water, there is talk of how everyone is going in the direction of "the thing," but we're never told what or where it is.
The film's meditative mood is established at the beginning by Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel," a spare, brooding piece for piano and violin that is fast becoming a movie soundtrack cliché, having been used to telegraph instant profundity by Tom Tykwer in "Heaven" and Mike Nichols in his HBO adaptation of Margaret Edson's play "Wit." But as the film tracks its lost boys farther into a wilderness that becomes increasingly arid and forbidding, the words and music fall away.
Gradually the landscape takes over the movie, and by the halfway point, "Gerry" has succeeded in conveying a sense of forsakenness as intense as Tom Hanks's desert island solitude in "Cast Away." At the same time, the shimmering, craggy majesty of the desert begins to weave its spell. Its desolate grandeur recalls the earthquake-ravaged terrain explored by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in films like "And Life Goes On" and "Through the Olive Trees." As in Mr. Kiarostami's portraits of rural Iranian society picking itself up after a catastrophe, the soundtrack catches the rush of wind along with rumbles of distant thunder. Implacable and stone-faced, murmuring its own impenetrable language, nature stands sentinel over human frailty.
The cinematography includes surreal touches like sped-up clouds and shadows, along with a deliberate discontinuity. The weather in "Gerry" is in continual flux. One moment thick gray clouds are scurrying over the mountaintops; the next, we're in a different location where the sky is blue, the breeze is calm and the mountains have been replaced by dunes. "Gerry" was filmed in Argentina and around Death Valley in California and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the abruptness of its shifts from one location to another lends the allegory a gloss of science fiction.
Harris Savides's panoramic cinematography unfolds as a sequence of extended, lingering takes that create the illusion of a story being told in real time, then break that illusion. Some of the most magnificent shots observe the characters as moving dots painstakingly inching across a windswept landscape. At other times, the camera does a slow 360-degree turn around a character to evoke an agoraphobe's nightmare of being stranded in the middle of nowhere, engulfed by the elements.
"Gerry" sketches a portrait of a complicated friendship that looks back obliquely to the bond between River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in Mr. Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho." Mr. Affleck's character, the younger of the Gerrys, is the more reckless and emotional and the first to panic and break into tears, to the exasperation of his more stoic companion. When the friends separate to reconnoiter their position from different desert peaks, Mr. Affleck ends up marooned on a rock 20 feet high from which the only way down is to jump.
The most dramatically charged moment comes late in the film, when the friends are almost too exhausted and dehydrated to move. Mr. Affleck, who is prepared to die, reaches over to Mr. Damon, who rolls on top of him in an embrace loaded with psychological and metaphysical ambiguity.
With all its quirks, "Gerry" seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers. Moviegoers who stumble into "Gerry" expecting a wisecracking buddy movie or "Good Will Hunting 2" should be warned: as the movie stretches out, they may find themselves as befuddled and directionless as its foolhardy outdoorsmen lurching across the wasteland without a compass or a canteen.
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