Now that The Matrix is such an obvious laughing stock, it seems that the Net's philosophers are deserting its cause and instead rallying around Gus van Sant's equally laughable Gerry. Gerry is about two guys, both called Gerry, who go on a hiking trip to see "the thing" and end up getting lost and wandering for days through various deserts. Except they're really just two halves of the same guy, and the deserts are really metaphorical deserts of... something. It's enough to make me long for the gravitas of Keanu Reeves.
Gerry should have been, and probably has been, the stuff of a five-minute student short; but since this isn't film school and there's nobody around to rein in the director's self-indulgence, the damn thing goes on for nearly two hours. There is still only five minutes' worth of actual content, though, so most of the running time is devoted to extremely long, dialogue-free, "artistic" takes of the two Gerries walking around the desert. What can it all mean?
Doubtless the desert metaphor has a lot of appeal for the more solipsistic types out there, who see themselves, like the protagonists, lost in an intellectual or emotional or moral wasteland. But the world isn't a desert, guys; it's full of living, breathing, thinking people, many of whom live and breathe and think more than you, so get used to it. Or maybe that's the film's point: the world is a vibrant place, but the weaker, whiny, computer-game-playing side of ourselves leads us away and keeps us trapped... in which case Gerry is yet another cinematic paean to the strong, primitive type, the Ur-man, a trait it shares with such radical fare as Con Air and Jurassic Park III. It's lose-lose.
There are plenty of other possible interpretations, but I don't see why I should bother. Art needs a commitment from both sides, and if the artists haven't put in the work, I'm not going to either. From start to finish, Gerry is lazy stuff, intellectually lazy and artistically lazy. The filmmakers take a standard, general-purpose metaphor -- the desert -- and leave it there. Everything else -- character, plot, motivation -- is left vague. There aren't enough specifics nailed down on which to build anything. For every interpretation I could throw in, the sands of the desert could take a hundred more. It's one thing to be "open to interpretation", but another to be so open that everything fits in. Art is about limits -- the limits defined by the artist's vision -- not about being all things to all men.
It also must be said that if Gerry works, it works only as metaphor. Even its fans would admit it has no narrative to speak of and its characters are blanks. All we are left with is the vast symbol of the desert and what little we can make from the odd patches of banal dialogue. I'll pass, thanks. It's not enough just to stick a symbol on the screen and hope I'll make sense of it. In any work of art, symbolism and metaphor are at most secondary pleasures, something to keep you entertained after you've already been hooked. In film, symbolism takes second place to narrative, characterisation, dialogue, or the combination of sound and images (though I think the importance of the latter is overstated in certain quarters). If none of these are present, why should I be interested in investigating further? I'll no sooner play with your metaphors than I'll play with a Rubik's cube.
Of course, some people would argue that Gerry is a beautiful combination of sound and images, a visual feast, but I can't agree. Sure, we get beautiful desert scenery, with panoramas, hills, rock formations and time-lapse clouds; but this kind of thing is done more competently on the average BBC nature film, and with much less pretentiousness. (And I don't like nature films anyway.) As with everything else in the movie, the images in Gerry lose something by being so vague, by being divorced from context. Shots of generic desert are much less interesting than shots of the Patagonian Desert or the Atacama Desert, in the same way that shots of a generic bedroom are much less interesting than shots of, say, Jennifer Anniston's bedroom.
In any case, it's hard for me to call a set of images beautiful when so many of them feature that squinting lunk Matt Damon. Damon once again demonstrates his ability to resemble a stiff plank in a wide variety of roles, even though this particular role -- an inarticulate twentysomething slacker -- is no doubt backed up by a lifetime of method acting. Matt evidently also prepared for his part with some strenuous pie-eating: in the infamous "bobbing chins" sequence, it was hard to figure out where his chins ended, and Casey Affleck's began.
Yup, that's Casey Affleck. It's bad enough that Gerry gives us two hours of pretentious tedium, but this is worse: the last thing the world needs is another Affleck. Especially when said Affleck is even whinier and more annoying than his brother. Why do these people have a career? The existence of Casey and Ben and other straight-to-cinema wonders makes me pine for the days when actors had to grind out an apprenticeship on the stage. Say what you like about stage-trained actors, but at least you can hear what they'll say back. Of all the attributes an actor can have, the most underrated is a powerful voice. (And people involved in film production agree with me -- the most common complaint from casting directors is that they can't hear the people being auditioned.) A good voice will cover up a million other acting deficiencies. Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart, for example, don't have much range as actors, but their big stage voices give them an instant charisma and presence. Once, every leading actor had a voice that could fill a theatre unaided, a voice that would stand out in a room. Audiences deserve better than mumbling creeps like the Afflecks, who have trouble projecting past their own adenoids.
But I digress. I want to return to the movie so I can make another digression about its music. Gerry's ten-minute takes are accompanied by a rather aimless, spartan piano tinkling, periodically interrupted by pronounced, bell-like chords, in a way that made me think "Wow! A bad rip-off of Arvo Pärt!" When the credits revealed that the tinkling in fact was Arvo Pärt, I felt both disappointed and vindicated. Disappointed, because I once thought Pärt was a good composer, and vindicated because it confirmed my increasing suspicions that he's really a bit of a phony. Pärt has done some good stuff, notably the 3rd Symphony, but since the 80s he has done nothing but sit back and channel Philip Glass. His "tintinabulli" style is just a formula that lets him crank out regular blocks of uninspired easy listening for poser's label ECM. Fratres, Passio, Spiegel im Spiegel -- once you've heard one of these things, you've heard them all.
Gerry is a weak film -- empty, poorly conceived, poorly directed, poorly acted. Its popularity is no doubt a response to the celluloid-acres of loud, overblown, unsubtle, CGI-heavy crap that fill cinemas today. There are large numbers of people who find no enjoyment in the average Hollywood spectacle, who quite understandably want a change of pace, something slower, different, more artistic, more intelligent. They see what they are looking for in Gerry -- but Gerry is fool's gold, cinematic charlatanry. Its long takes are a substitute for thinking, its long silences are the sound of filmmakers with nothing to say -- though they desperately want you to think otherwise. One IMDB critic wrote that the film "wears its intelligence on its sleeve"; but so did the emperor, dude, so did the emperor.