Kelly Reichardt -- Glimpses of the 'Real' America, Lost in Plain Sight

Chloe Zhao’s Oscar winning Best Picture film Nomadland gave a sudden, somewhat surprising, mainstream platform to the stories of down on their luck, ‘normal,’ unglamorous Americans, the types of stories that Oregonian Kelly Reichardt has been making for more than 10 years. While Reichardt may never have achieved the acceptance from the establishment that Zhao did this year, her films are just as powerful in their subtle, minimalist depiction of Americans whose stories feel so fresh it is almost shocking how realistic they are compared to the rest of the American film industry.

Reichardt’s second film Old Joy, and her newest film, First Cow, bookmark her career thus far. Both are set in Oregon (as are all of her films with the exception of two) and while most of her films have strong women characters as their protagonists, often played by Michelle Williams, these films are almost entirely devoid of female characters and instead focus on 2 very close male friendships. Though Old Joy is set in modern day Oregon and First Cow in the early settling days of the 19th Century, the platonic male friendships of the two films bind them together thematically.

Seeing Old Joy is a wonderful entrance into the world of Reichardt. At first glance the film seems to be about nothing more than a weekend getaway trip for the tied down and, if not settled, in the process of settling, Mark, who has a pregnant girlfriend and a job, and his old friend Kurt, a slightly overweight, goofy looking guy with curly red hair who has not ‘achieved’ the same mid 30s lifestyle that is expected of the average American of having a partner, job, and stable living.

Yet after looking closer, Reichardt’s film seamlessly delves into themes of politics, class, gender, friendship, and sex through the slightest of movements. If you aren’t paying attention you will not catch them at all, but the silences and glances between the two men speak volumes. Reichardt never bashes the audience over the head or preaches to us. She presents a simple trip, and brings us along for the ride to present these themes to us less through what is unsaid, what is left hanging, and what is insinuated through body language and silence. She neither romanticizes the stable life of Mark, nor the nontraditional one of Kurt. Instead they both seem to be trapped in a society that does not allow either the well intentioned liberal minded man, nor the against the establishment hippie to live an ideal life. As friends grow older they grow apart, but here the message seems much more profound. It is as if the system’s expectations of how we should live, through work, relationships, gender, etc, is really what drives these two men apart. When they are alone in the forest, they finally relax and shake off these restraints, but it is only a vacation from reality, a day trip. The next day they will be thrown back into their worlds of responsibility and their assigned economic and sexual realities.

On this trip we are not simply alone with these two male characters, we are surrounded by the lush, green Oregon forests, whose nature is so overpowering it seems as if it is about swallow the two men, the road, the car, and anything else man made in sight. Reichardt’s films are all about their setting as much as they are about the characters in the frame. She dedicates minutes of runtime to looking out the car window and watching the views whizz past. In all her films there is a sense that these characters are just coincidentally passing through these landscapes, like so many people have before and so many will after. This idea is wonderfully depicted in the beginning of First Cow as a young woman in modern day Oregon is casually walking her dog on a path bordered by long yellow reeds and a river. We see a giant cargo ship drifting across the river. We sit and ponder as we watch this enormous industrial mammoth slither across the screen. Reichardt is soon to transport us several hundred years before to the same river where pioneers, traders, and miners are looking to survive and prosper in the American West. How far we have come, yet the river is still there continuing its steady flow.

In First Cow the two friends are the chubby and timid cook, Cookie, and the business minded King-Lu, a Chinese immigrant. This is Reichardt’s second period piece, and despite its obviously carefully researched and expertly executed art direction and costumes, it's intentions go far beyond its surface beauty and ‘believableness.’ We are, again, along for an adventure with two unconventional friends, certainly not the typical heroes of the Western genre. Yet, in order to make it in this dog eat dog world to achieve their American dream, our heroes are forced into a life a crime — they decide to rob the milk of a cow of a man called the ‘Chief Factor,’ a rich Englishman who almost seems to reign over the settlement like a type of lord, in order to sell baked goods in the market. This petty crime sets the slight plot in motion and shows American economics in its earliest days in order to critique its current state. Nothing much seems to have changed. We all dream of making it big, yet the game is a set up. The winners are predetermined, and the unlucky majority must fight and suffer and steal in order to aspire for a fraction of the winners’ pot of gold.

The First Cow of the film’s title is the first cow brought to Oregon. While in the 1800s cows were transported down the river, today we have progressed to send cargo ships down it. Yet despite these advances, someone like Kurt is likely to end up living under a bridge in modern Oregon while the rich blame his misery on himself and accuse him of stealing their milk.

Between these two films Reichardt made three films with her regular collaborator and muse Michelle Williams. Williams can look as glamorous as any other Hollywood actress, but Reichardt dresser her down as a pilgrim on the Oregon trail in Meek’s Cutoff, a determined but uptight middle class woman with a family in Certain Women, and, in what is perhaps her greatest film, as an unlucky young woman with a few dollars to her name, a dog, and a beaten up car on her way to Alaska.

This unlucky woman is Wendy in Wendy and Lucy. Lucy is her dog, Reichardt’s real life dog Lucy who also makes an appearance in Old Joy. With Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy is the director's most minimalist film. Reichardt is like a modern day American neorealist director, and this is her Bicycle Thieves. But instead of Wendy losing her bike, she loses her Lucy and we accompany her throughout the film in her search for her companion.

Everything goes from bad to worse when the security guard at a Walgreens wakes Wendy up early and tells her she cannot sleep in her car in their parking lot. Her car does not start, the mechanic is not open, she counts her money to ration how much she has to fix it, ties Lucy to a bike rack outside the supermarket (a nod to Bicycle Thieves?) and decides to rob a couple things from the supermarket (a bit like Cookie and King-Lu’s harmless crime). However she is caught by a teenage worker who prides himself in turning her into the manager and convinces him to turn her into the police to set an example. ‘If she can’t afford dog food, she shouldn’t have a dog.’ For stealing 10 dollars worth of merchandise Wendy suddenly finds herself in a police car to the station and by the time she gets back to the supermarket her dog has disappeared. She turns to the pound, the supermarket workers, and puts up signs around town, but the only real person who seems to help her is the unnamed security guard (Wally Dalton) who was just doing his job when he woke Wendy up to set everything in motion. He lends her his phone and his optimism, and in a tear-inducing scene offers her what little money he can, an amount so small that goes to show that Wendy is far from the only one just scraping by. 

Again, Reichardt here presents us with a protagonist that we are not accustomed to see. It is not a melodrama about poor people, but it is a realist, harsh, methodical film about how hard it is to survive if you have little and no one to count on. The system is self serving, and if something goes wrong in your plan it is a lonely world and you have no one but yourself to blame. Here more than ever Reichardt shows that she is willing to show us the types of Americans and the problems in America that few other directors take on in the same way. It is a simple film where a simple problem suddenly becomes seemingly impossible to overcome, yet life must go on and despite the soullessness of the system against a person without resources, these people either keep on trying and overcome the humiliation, or give up everything.

Reichardt’s second collaboration with Williams, Meek’s Cutoff, was her first period piece and follows three families and their covered wagons lead by the grizzly, boastful and loud mouthed Meek. Reichardt takes a realistic look at the unforgiving journey across the barren plains, with shots of the wagons going across rivers and up and down uneven ground, dragged by beasts, men, and women in what must be suffocating dresses and bonnets. It is hard to imagine a man dedicating such long takes to the women dragging themselves across the flat lands under the scorching sun under so many layers of fabric. The images are beautiful, yet painful. And Williams role as the no nonsense woman who takes control of the group when she gets fed up puts the finishing touch on this feminist vision of life on the great plains. Reichardt also brilliantly adds a Native American character to the plot. He is clearly a threat to our white European heroes, so they decide to keep him as a prisoner and guide. The only problem is that he speaks no English, and instead of translating what he says to the audience, we stay just as ignorant as they do as he blabbers to himself. This causes us to feel as lost and alien to the world as they do, as if we the audience were also taking for granted that this land is not ours and that we are unrightly claiming it. 

Williams and Reichardt worked together one more time (though they are already said to be working on another project to be released in the next couple years), Certain Women, a film composed of three very loosely related shorts about women in Montana. Though all Reichart’s films are beautifully shot thanks to brilliant work by her and her cinematographers, Peter Sillen (Old Joy), Sam Levy (Wendy and Lucy), and Christopher Blauvelt (Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow), here she and Blauvelt really outdo themselves. Every shot looks like a painting. The yellow, blue, and white hues are crushingly beautiful in a way reminiscent of Nestor Alemendros’ work in Days of Heaven. Here Williams is the protagonist in the second of the shorts, as a hard working, stubborn woman looking to build a rustic house in the countryside. Her bleach blond hair, and businesswoman way of carrying herself and speaking are the mirror image of the perfect houses she wants to build. Yet her secret smoking habit and inability to maintain a cool headed conversation with her daughter and husband all point to fact that no matter how perfect she and her house may seem on the surface, they are sure to be tragically tormented on the inside. 

The first story in the film is a brilliantly comic Coen-esque short starring Laura Dern as a patient and caring lawyer despite the sexism she faces daily and the crazy client she has who creates a hostage situation with her and a Samoan king. And the third story stars Kristen Stewart, perfectly cast as a nervous, flakey adult education teacher, and Lily Gladstone as a quiet rancher who falls in love with her. Gladstone is an amazing screen presence whose face is as emotive and mysterious as the Montana landscapes. No words of love are ever exchanged between the two, and Sterwart’s character is obviously not interested, but Gladstone, as a simple rancher whose only company seems to be comprised of a short, spirited dog, and the horses she tends to, seems to see all the unknown possibilities of an unvisited world displayed in Sterwart’s young woman from the ‘big city’ Montana capital. The stories are adapted from Montana writer Maile Meloy, and again show normal women in America who suffer the ups and downs of modern life. Their stories are captivating in their conventionality.

The film that seems the most out of place in Reichardt’s filmography is the gripping thriller Night Moves starring Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as eco-terrorists who decide to blow up a dam. The film is shot in Reichardt’s traditional realist style at a slow, steady pace, but the events of the film are much more dramatic than those in her others. Her directing style makes the film more of a character study or an ethical study, than a spectacle. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire runtime, and she puts forth an argument about terrorism that very few directors or studios would present to an audience. Is it possible that ‘terrorists’ could be the good guys on some situations? And could it be that ‘terrorist’ is not even the correct word sometimes despite what politicians and mass media tell us? She does far from answer these questions in her film, but she looks at the actions of her protagonists who want to make a difference, to raise questions, as a legitimate viewpoint. There are some nail bitingly tense scenes, and an ending that leaves forces you to take the themes of guilt and morality home with you. It is a thrillingly political genre film that proves that Reichardt would be more than capable of handling a big budget film were she ever to decide to do one.

However, due to Reichardt’s resistance to Hollywood thus far, it is hard to imagine she would ever be tempted to succumb to the blindingly superficial bright lights. And thank God for that. It is refreshing to know that her and Williams are working together on another project that will almost surely continue to take a hard look at the lives of the Americans that are not represented in the industry, the Americans that make up a majority of the country but somehow seem foreign when they are seen on screen. Nomadland is a sign that these films can make noise, and let's hope that Reichardt and Zhao can ride the wave of its success to continue painting portraits of the ‘real’ America, lost in plain sight.