Nice and Easy

Reviewed - Old Joy:THE news that Kelly Reichardt's second full-length(ish) feature includes original music by Yo La Tengo, those delightfully comatose strummers from New Jersey, should alert readers that they are not to expect car chases, atom bombs or alien invasions.

Sure enough, Old Joy proves to be a tranquil amble of a film, during which no more than three things happen (at least two of which would barely register as incidents in a Jim Jarmusch film). This odd, obstinate road movie is, nonetheless, definitely worth getting excited about. Irresistibly hypnotic and intermittently wise, it makes the argument for the virtues of cinematic inactivity as forcefully as did the early pictures of Abbas Kiarostami and Víctor Erice.

Daniel London and Will Oldham (also known as the musician Bonnie Prince Billy) star as Mark and Kurt, two old friends who - the former now married, the latter stubbornly unattached - decide to make their way out of Portland for a weekend in the neighbouring mountains.

After a small amount of motoring in the wrong direction, they stop to build a fire, drink some beer and debate the shape and nature of the universe. The next day they make their way to a hot spring where Kurt, something of a proto-hippie, offers the uncomfortable Mark, whose wife is close to giving birth, a friendly shoulder massage. Then they go home.

So what's the point? There is certainly something being said here about a country on the point of significant change. Old Joy takes place in the run-up to the 2004 election and, just as Mark is about to see his life overturned by parenthood, America is set to take itself and the world towards even greater perils. Meanwhile, Kurt, conscious that he is being left behind by his buddy, stands in for those landscapes that remain unaltered by the passing years.

However, Reichardt's picture, adapted from a story by Jonathan Raymond, is, mostly to do with the colours of the forest, the sound that water makes when falling, and the modest bliss sustained silence can induce. Think about all this too long and the Zen obscurity may, admittedly, drive you to fits of screaming. Let it flow over you and it will have a similarly soothing effect to that induced by the average Yo La Tengo record.