![]() ![]() This impenetrability perhaps is meant to position Josh as a lost soul fighting for a lost planet. Each is left alone with their own consciences, their own moral compasses, and the audience is increasingly left alone with Josh, whose suspicious, gloomy expression hardly changes throughout and who, to the end, remains unknowable. After carrying out their plot, Josh, Dena and Harmon, never particularly united in the first place, separate. The reason, largely, is Josh, the least personable character that Reichardt and Raymond have ever crafted, particularly as played by a taciturn Eisenberg. But having watched Night Moves twice now - the first time when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year - it remains her only film that has left me cold, even as I can't seem to quite shake it. Reichardt is one of the most talented, thoughtful American directors working today. "Who says?" he asks, and then scoffs at her reply: "Yeah, well, maybe science is wrong." ![]() So much is clear when Harmon reacts strongly to Dena's doomsday facts about the world's declining fish population. Night Moves doesn't doubt the basic rationale behind the trio's activism (this isn't a surreptitious case against environmentalism), but it's clearly skeptical about this particular cast of characters, whose motives turn out to diverge significantly or, in Josh's case, be nearly impossible to discern. That's true both literally - we watch many parts of their plan unfold through long shots, with unaware bystanders appearing in the foreground increasingly as the event nears - and morally. ![]() Reichardt, working with her regular screenwriting partner Jonathan Raymond, keeps us at a distance from the trio. It's all very quiet, very still, a standard mood for Reichardt that in this case slowly turns to dread as Dena, Josh and a third partner in crime, Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), set in motion a plan to load Josh and Dena's boat with explosives and blow up a nearby dam in an act of consciousness-raising eco-terrorism. Reichardt keenly observes these spaces - the spa that Dena (Dakota Fanning) works at, the idyllic farm where Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) lives - to the point that when Josh and Dena purchase a boat together, Reichardt has Josh enter the seller's home and, in a quick pan around his dining room and living room, lets us briefly relish in the comfort of his suburban life. So it ought to be immediately suspicious that Night Moves, Reichardt's ultimately unsatisfying new film, portrays nature at first as a calm refuge and emphasizes the peaceful homes that its characters inhabit. ![]()
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