Gus Van Sant (2002)

In an opening sequence that lasts several minutes the camera follows a car travelling along a mostly deserted road.  Only one other vehicle appears, in addition to a couple of horses in a roadside field.  The camera moves for a relatively short time in front of the car to reveal the two young men inside it – Casey Affleck driving, Matt Damon in the passenger seat – before resuming its previous point of view.   The car eventually stops and the men get out.  As they start walking along a track marked ‘Wilderness Trail’, they exchange greetings with a group of hikers approaching from the opposite direction.  From this point on and until its closing sequence, Gerry is a two-hander.

Written by Gus Van Sant and the actors, the film has two essential inspirations.  The plot derives from real-life events:  in 1999, best friends David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian got lost while hiking in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico; for Coughlin, the consequences were fatal.  In terms of film-making style, Gerry is indebted particularly to Béla Tarr, renowned for his existential themes and extraordinarily long takes.  I didn’t get far with the only Tarr film I’ve attempted – his latest, The Turin Horse (2011) – and I doubt I’d have got much out of Gerry with, say, the younger Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey in the title role(s).  In the company of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon, however, the grim journey is thoroughly engaging.  Flawless naturalistic acting means that neither Affleck nor Damon seems to be performing yet they’re always, unobtrusively building their characters’ increasing desperation.  They also make the most of occasional opportunities to raise a laugh.

Both young men are called Gerry, which sounds gimmicky but doesn’t turn out that way, not least because the dialogue is pretty sparse.  (The word ‘gerry’ features in the script as a noun as well as a vocative.  It’s a synonym for cock-up that Damon and the Affleck brothers, according to Van Sant, were in the habit of using long before the film was made.)  Embarking on their hike without food or drink, a compass or a map, the Gerrys lose their way almost immediately.  On their first night, they build a camp fire and are still light-hearted.  Things go from bad to worse during the following day as they wander through the wilderness.  After splitting up for a while, they rejoin each other, retrace their steps and follow animal tracks.  Every attempt to get their bearings is fruitless.  The pair are increasingly tetchy with each other, then silent, as they enter desert terrain.

On the face of it, the Gerrys’ complete unpreparedness is unlikely enough to make you wonder if the story is primarily symbolic – if their plight is meant to demonstrate the wages of man’s hubris, the ultimate futility of human endeavour, that kind of thing[1].  The film’s landscape (the actual shooting locations included Death Valley, the Utah salt flats and somewhere in Argentina) is certainly enough to bear this interpretation.  It’s a third major character and the most powerful presence in Gerry.  The DP Harris Savides is, along with the director and his two actors, a fourth major contributor to the piece.  Savides’s images give the story the quality of an existential parable and, at the same time, intense physical reality.

The landscape, both dynamic and impassive, would be easier to take if the viewer, along with the protagonists, wasn’t trapped in it.  The effect is compelling, though:  the series of prolonged takes during which the camera’s lack of movement exerts a fascination includes an episode when the Affleck Gerry is stranded on a high rock.  He has no option but to – eventually – jump down, his fall broken by the ‘dirt mattress’ prepared by the Damon Gerry.  It’s as if the camera’s spell is briefly broken too.  When Damon asks if Affleck is OK, the latter’s laconic ‘Yeah’ is unaccountably funny.  The physical contrasts between the actors and the temperamental differences of their characters are absorbing too.  Damon’s is the more phlegmatic, amenable to suggestions from the relatively wilful Affleck.   (Damon was just turned thirty and Affleck in his mid-twenties when the film was made.)

I didn’t know beforehand either about the real-life events that inspired Gerry or how it turned out.  That helped put me in a frame of mind analogous to the Gerrys’:  I assumed, like them, they’d escape their terrible predicament until the point came when I realised, as they do, that that seemed impossible.  In the desert, the dialogue dries up as much through despair as through fatigue.  There’s really nothing more to say – until they both collapse, exhausted and dehydrated, and Affleck Gerry murmurs, ‘I’m leaving now’, reaching weakly towards his friend.

Damon rolls on top of Affleck, strangles him and passes out again.  After a while, he comes to and sees a shimmering in the distance – not a mirage this time but actual cars on the highway.  He gets up and stumbles towards them.  In the closing shots of Gerry, Van Sant returns to a travelling car.  As before, Damon is a passenger.  The driver is now a man who, with his young son, appears to have rescued him.  In contrast to the film’s opening sequence, which is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, there’s no music on the soundtrack for this return journey.  And words continue to fail the sole surviving Gerry.

22 February 2020

[1] The Wikipedia account of the Coughlin-Kodikian incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_David_Coughlin – suggests that, although these two were ill equipped for their camping exhibition, they weren’t quite so short of vital supplies as the Gerrys are:  ‘Kodikian and Coughlin had only brought three pints … of water and one pint … of Gatorade.  One pint of water was used to boil hot dogs during their first evening in the canyon.  Although they had a topographical map, neither knew how to properly read it’.