Gerry - A Desert Odyssey
Gus Van Sant has specialised in giving his audience films with simple surfaces and complex undercurrents. Paranoid Park (2007), Last Days (2005) and Elephant (2003) each told natural tales in an effortless fashion but at their heart they rigorously explored the themes of death and mortality. Gerry (2002) is the distillation of this multifaceted approach to form, narrative and theme in which states-of-mind are rendered through the visual and aural design.
Gus Van Sant's Film of Contrasts
One day two young men named Gerry (Matt Damon) and Gerry (Casey Affleck) (the two actors previously worked with Van Sant on Good Will Hunting (1998)) walk into an unspecified national park on a wilderness trail. Soon they are lost. In their efforts to get back to civilisation they travel through an ever-changing landscape. The further they venture the more they relinquish their grip on reality. And then tragedy strikes. This brief summation of Gerry's plot somewhat ironically offers more drama and tension than the actual movie. Van Sant has taken a minimalist approach to story and steered his focus toward creating a mood of apprehension and anxiety.
There has been much speculation about the meaning of Gerry. Such a simple story beckons dense interpretations that will inevitably veer toward existential rumination. But I believe it is more fruitful to focus on the film's formal elements and examine the way the movie's structure and visual design operates to create atmosphere and elicit sensation.
Reality and Hyperreality
There are several contrasting elements in Gerry's structure which are intended to primarily affect the viewer's senses. The flat narrative and sparse dialogue lends the movie a naturalistic quality that heightens the immediacy of the action. Van Sant allows scenes to play out much longer than is customary in Hollywood films in which any excess material is excised and left on the cutting room floor. As such the viewer feels a close connection to the characters of Gerry, the boredom and monotony of their situation is fleshed-out and made palpable by this ordinary representation.
This naturalism gradually dissipates as the characters' journey enters the surreal world of delusions brought on by dehydration. In this respect Van Sant opts not for fantastic imagery but for a kind of hyperreality in which the senses are overpowered by oddities and aberrations. The further Gerry and Gerry venture into the wilderness the more the landscape changes and the less it resembles a recognisable earth. Before they know it the two protagonists are beyond the brush and ravines of the national park and in red-earth mountains reminiscent of the opening moments of Franklin J Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968). Later they hobble through a barren flat desert landscape and finally the pair shuffle seemingly endlessly across a featureless salt plain. During these latter scenes strange music and aural effects can be heard, a tool used by Van Sant to further enforce the hyperreality that confronts the two characters.
Motion and Inertia
The alternation of tracking and static shots throughout Gerry is another formal component used by the director to enhance the movie's dreamlike mood. The film opens with a languorous travelling shot that follows just behind the main characters' car as it winds its way to the launching place for their wilderness trek. This scene is then contrasted with a still shot of the two protagonists as they arrive at their destination seated in the car. Van Sant holds this static angle even when the two characters depart the vehicle. The director maintains this alternating structure of tracking shots with stationary angles eliciting contrasting moods and sensations. The travelling shots tend to make the viewer's head swim with their lyricism and beauty. And several sequences in which the camera merely tags along as the characters walk are mesmerising in their simplicity.
Van Sant enlistment of a static camera works to elevate the tension of several scenes. These moments tend to be claustrophobic in nature because the viewer is anchored to an unchanging point-of-view with restricted spatial parameters. A case in point is the sequence where Affleck's Gerry is 'rock-marooned' - standing atop a large boulder with no means of descent except to jump. Despite the length of the scene, which involves Damon's Gerry fashioning a soft landing place for his friend, Van Sant maintains the single objective camera position some distance away. The length of the sequence and the single camera angle conspire to heighten the tension while intensifying the dread and unease of the characters.
Nature and Trivia
Numerous sequences in Gerry allude to the raw and relentless power of nature, demonstrating mankind's insignificance within its precincts. Van Sant employs time-lapse photographic techniques to amplify these forces and accentuate their natural beauty. The two Gerrys are dwarfed by their environment and their journey loses all perspective against the backdrop of the unknowable majesty and grace of nature. The sequences which focus on nature's overwhelming power are contrasted sharply with the trivial verbal exchanges shared between the two protagonists. The Gerrys' largely improvised dialogue is restricted to mundane conversations about popular culture and self-conscious ramblings. Affleck at one point details his calamitous misfortune while playing a simulation-style computer game. And Damon derides a Wheel of Fortune contestant for failing to solve a puzzle correctly despite only needing one further clue. This type of commonplace frivolity pales into insignificance shortly thereafter as the natural environment closes in around them to challenge their mortality.
While at face value Gerry's narrative appears to have all the elements of the typical Hollywood thriller--danger, crisis, despair--Van Sant carefully manoeuvres his film into different territory. Gerry is a moody film that relies heavily on formal devices to elicit corporal responses from the viewer. Van Sant's film is reminiscent of the experimental films of a bygone era--most notably Andy Warhol's work throughout the 1960s--which sought to use the medium of film as a tool to educe sensations within the spectator. For experimentalists like Warhol and Stan Brakhage the story was subordinate to the film form, and this is true of Van Sant's Gerry.
Gus Van Sant's Film of Contrasts
One day two young men named Gerry (Matt Damon) and Gerry (Casey Affleck) (the two actors previously worked with Van Sant on Good Will Hunting (1998)) walk into an unspecified national park on a wilderness trail. Soon they are lost. In their efforts to get back to civilisation they travel through an ever-changing landscape. The further they venture the more they relinquish their grip on reality. And then tragedy strikes. This brief summation of Gerry's plot somewhat ironically offers more drama and tension than the actual movie. Van Sant has taken a minimalist approach to story and steered his focus toward creating a mood of apprehension and anxiety.
Casey Affleck and Matt Damon - looking at you!
Reality and Hyperreality
There are several contrasting elements in Gerry's structure which are intended to primarily affect the viewer's senses. The flat narrative and sparse dialogue lends the movie a naturalistic quality that heightens the immediacy of the action. Van Sant allows scenes to play out much longer than is customary in Hollywood films in which any excess material is excised and left on the cutting room floor. As such the viewer feels a close connection to the characters of Gerry, the boredom and monotony of their situation is fleshed-out and made palpable by this ordinary representation.
This naturalism gradually dissipates as the characters' journey enters the surreal world of delusions brought on by dehydration. In this respect Van Sant opts not for fantastic imagery but for a kind of hyperreality in which the senses are overpowered by oddities and aberrations. The further Gerry and Gerry venture into the wilderness the more the landscape changes and the less it resembles a recognisable earth. Before they know it the two protagonists are beyond the brush and ravines of the national park and in red-earth mountains reminiscent of the opening moments of Franklin J Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968). Later they hobble through a barren flat desert landscape and finally the pair shuffle seemingly endlessly across a featureless salt plain. During these latter scenes strange music and aural effects can be heard, a tool used by Van Sant to further enforce the hyperreality that confronts the two characters.
Still walking...
Motion and Inertia
The alternation of tracking and static shots throughout Gerry is another formal component used by the director to enhance the movie's dreamlike mood. The film opens with a languorous travelling shot that follows just behind the main characters' car as it winds its way to the launching place for their wilderness trek. This scene is then contrasted with a still shot of the two protagonists as they arrive at their destination seated in the car. Van Sant holds this static angle even when the two characters depart the vehicle. The director maintains this alternating structure of tracking shots with stationary angles eliciting contrasting moods and sensations. The travelling shots tend to make the viewer's head swim with their lyricism and beauty. And several sequences in which the camera merely tags along as the characters walk are mesmerising in their simplicity.
Van Sant enlistment of a static camera works to elevate the tension of several scenes. These moments tend to be claustrophobic in nature because the viewer is anchored to an unchanging point-of-view with restricted spatial parameters. A case in point is the sequence where Affleck's Gerry is 'rock-marooned' - standing atop a large boulder with no means of descent except to jump. Despite the length of the scene, which involves Damon's Gerry fashioning a soft landing place for his friend, Van Sant maintains the single objective camera position some distance away. The length of the sequence and the single camera angle conspire to heighten the tension while intensifying the dread and unease of the characters.
Damon in the Desert
Nature and Trivia
Numerous sequences in Gerry allude to the raw and relentless power of nature, demonstrating mankind's insignificance within its precincts. Van Sant employs time-lapse photographic techniques to amplify these forces and accentuate their natural beauty. The two Gerrys are dwarfed by their environment and their journey loses all perspective against the backdrop of the unknowable majesty and grace of nature. The sequences which focus on nature's overwhelming power are contrasted sharply with the trivial verbal exchanges shared between the two protagonists. The Gerrys' largely improvised dialogue is restricted to mundane conversations about popular culture and self-conscious ramblings. Affleck at one point details his calamitous misfortune while playing a simulation-style computer game. And Damon derides a Wheel of Fortune contestant for failing to solve a puzzle correctly despite only needing one further clue. This type of commonplace frivolity pales into insignificance shortly thereafter as the natural environment closes in around them to challenge their mortality.
While at face value Gerry's narrative appears to have all the elements of the typical Hollywood thriller--danger, crisis, despair--Van Sant carefully manoeuvres his film into different territory. Gerry is a moody film that relies heavily on formal devices to elicit corporal responses from the viewer. Van Sant's film is reminiscent of the experimental films of a bygone era--most notably Andy Warhol's work throughout the 1960s--which sought to use the medium of film as a tool to educe sensations within the spectator. For experimentalists like Warhol and Stan Brakhage the story was subordinate to the film form, and this is true of Van Sant's Gerry.
Gerry Poster
