Writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass captures Florida’s weirdness by presenting it as entirely mundane. It’s not a Florida noir, nor a Southern Western, nor a film that fetishizes the state’s purportedly alien qualities. It presents America’s tail as a humanist limbo, a space where joining the circus and joining the service are two paths out that are actually just circles to nowhere. She captures a state in which people hoping to cross eons, to get as far away as possible, who seem hopelessly apart from the world, may find a kindred spirit just one town over.  In River of Grass, to be “not from around here” applies to all and none of us, embodying an exciting vertigo and a paralytic nothingness. Florida is a space that we can offshore the nation’s peculiar aloneness and strange camaraderie to, but that really is just America.  

And River of Grass is a quintessential American text. Wandering with wooly abandon, carrying an imperfect idea about itself in its holster, it feels like a characteristic apostle of the American independent movement, a loose and amorphous thing more interested in momentary minutiae than eternity-chasing symbolic abstractions or dogmatic formulations. It was released at roughly the same time as Tony Scott’s True Romance and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, both of which would trouble the cinematic water in a way that Reichardt’s film , which didn’t make waves at the time, initially didn’t, but it joins them in telling a characteristically national tale of forlorn lovers on the run, looking for a conception of capital-M meaning to frame the rougher edges of their existence.

Stylistically, though, the three films couldn’t be further apart. Stone’s film was more the unholy progeny of European (or at least continental) neurosis and morbidly glorious excess. True Romance is the more obvious comparison to River. Both are not-so-quietly cribbing from Terrence Malick’s Badlands (itself an American variation of a European remix of an older American Depression narrative), drawing from Malick’s Emersonian openness to flux and skepticism about formalized institutions. But True Romance accents Emerson’s energy. It’s an American dynamo, a kinetic machine constantly inching toward torqued, fluorescent, Whitmanesque zeal.

Reichardt’s text is another thing entirely, not a motor revving the American id (like True Romance) or a fire-and-brimstone preacher castigating America’s unthinking viciousness (a la Natural Born Killers). Instead, it’s a gentle shift that touches the nation to slowly cast it in a new light. Malick’s Emersonian tension between immediacy and distance, his play between transcendental and empirical truth, is never not here, but the closer analogue might be Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise (to name another quintessential early text from a master of American ennui), with its deflationary wryness. Jarmusch and Malick aren’t one another, and Reichardt could be the hypotenuse of the two. She has Jarmusch’s wonderful appreciation for the absurd immanence of reality, his desire to luxuriate in everyday detritus, but she laminates it in Malick’s eye for the sublime aspiration toward rapturous grace that seems to animate so many American texts, framing themselves as dousing rods for something they might call the American soul.

It’s the weave between these influences that produces a film wonderfully adrift between here and there, often muddying the distinction between elevation and skepticism, potency and weariness, excitement and emptiness, losing itself in a swamp of muddy Americana.  The lost souls travelling this American path that seems both off-beat and run-of-the-mill are Cozy (Lisa Donaldson) and Lee (Larry Fessenden), who discover a like-minded need to commiserate in their boredom. When they kill a man while night-swimming in his pool, they take the opportunity to cast off like so many wounded Americans before them. What saves the film is how self-conscious it is that their eccentricities are, ultimately, thoroughly banal, that their vision of difference is, in fact, so similar to so many that have come beforehand. She has no interest in exciting us or in impressing the importance of these two onto our brains.

When they light off on the run, Reichardt prefers to digress and leap, to establish associative connections rather than narrative momentum. Even before anything happens, before anyone has been killed, she chooses not to ratchet up the tension but to loosen the rivets. At one point, she takes a moment to enjoy the presence of the two black fishermen she sees on the side of the road, minding their own business, before the camera pans to a car driving by. Rather than following the car, she cuts to an arcade machine, one that has no doubt been the backdrop to so many untold stories, seeing so much frustration taken out on it. Then we see Cozy’s father Jimmy (Dick Russell), an unspeaking police officer lamenting his recently-missing gun. Lee and Cozy have that gun, but they don’t know that it belongs to Cozy’s father, and he doesn’t know they have it. This could be the set up for a tragic tale of miscommunication, but what interests Reichardt is our desire for tragedy. A severe moment of self-reflection, she promises. Instead, she cuts to a montage of Jimmy almost losing his gun many times before, suddenly transforming this drifting, droll image of forlorn every-persons into a screw-loose, Looney Tunes-esque drunken odyssey of almost-misfirings and near-accidents. The tragedy at the core of this film was precipitated by so many other little miscommunications between hand and head, and is this particular incident really any worse?

The gun is the fetish object, the center around which the film orbits, like Mann’s Winchester ‘73. Or so we’re told. Movies have told us. America’s mythic outlaws tell us that, as do the revisionist films that do not celebrate but lament that violence. Each, in their own way, elevates the narrative of the American runaway to Greek tragedy. Instead, after the montage, Reichardt cuts back to an impossibly young Larry Fessenden fucking around with his cigarette and his lighter in the car. Not the gun, as we might expect, but another prop that fulfills his performance of the authentic renegade and his reality as a fuck-up knock-off of the same. It is Jimmy’s gun he has, and when he connects with Cozy, none of them know that Jimmy is her dad, or what they even want with the weapon. It’s a perfect set of connections, but the film delights in fucking up the metaphor.

Fuck ups, we all are. These characters simply cannot fulfill their archetypes. The story they write for themselves, that has been written by so many other American texts, crumbles around them. They haven’t actually killed anyone, we learn soon enough. They just need to think they have. The dramatic nature of the aborted crime gives a direction and outlet for the slower kind of crime they live in and cannot escape from. The story they’ve fabricated for themselves galvanizes their life in a narrative of vagabond American poetry, a restless drive to get nowhere that, if you know anything about Florida’s Southern tip, mostly has them going back and forth around the same 30 minutes of geography. They can’t even go on the run well. At one point, Lee spontaneously leaves a conversation, and the ensuing  “arrest that guy, he walked out in the middle of my sentence” might signify what may be the biggest a nuisance he’s ever really been. That is until he breaks the Dade County dress code by entering a store without his shoes on. These crimes are unbecoming of his aspirations, but they are his reality.

Sometimes, the universe seems to conspire to help them live out their imagined narratives, and maybe gives them a chance to reject them.  When Lee enters a drugstore to rob it, and he can’t do it, he is saved only because another man spontaneously – or fortuitously – enters to rob the store. When the owner punches him, regardless, it’s less because Lee has committed a crime than because he is there, than because the owner has no other way to make sense, or fail to make sense, of his own situation. He needs a robber to act upon, even if Lee isn’t it. In this gallery of minor crimes and spontaneous retributions, all eating away at you and often fulfilling nothing, Reichardt embodies Manny Farber’s “termite art,” with its (also very Emersonian) spirit of exploratory, spontaneous movement without end or even direction. The film’s hope is that they might find a way to appreciate the liberating aspects of this non-directionality rather than replace one inherited image with another. Reichardt gifts the characters, in self-consciously unsurprising fashion, images that promise and fail their search for a narrative of themselves, that question their modes of connection beyond themselves. They are, for the most part, mute mannequins unwilling to listen to her, a crime of the universe that is more aptly evoked in the Styrofoam mask left on a store front when Lee steals a wig off of it.

It falls on the film to speak in the characters’ absence, to make us come to terms with our failures. Despite, or because of, its gentle, ambling ways, Reichardt’s film at times exhales a repressed melancholy that borders on overpowering, an inchoate emotion whose manifestation is displaced onto the world itself. As Cozy stares out at the Atlantic, it sparkles with a frustrated desire the characters themselves cannot express, a manifold metaphor for unfulfilled desire. Recognizing Cozy’s longing for something she cannot name, Reichardt gives her the artist’s gift, a canvas for a poetic conscience that has no outlet in the material world available to her. By the film’s conclusion, though, Cozy is slowly drifting into an oblivion of modern America, a character living out a vastly different idiom than so many around her, but, ultimately, just one more identical car on the highway. Possibility is found not in the character’s capacity to accept the film’s gift but in the gift of the film itself: its scruffy leaps, its curious energies, its off-kilter jazz accompaniments that approach climax in Jimmy’s stunted drumming, a reminder of a past life as a musician disowned but not forgotten ultimately released in a blast of impotent rage. The film’s quieter, more plaintive rhythms capture a universe breathing in ways we aren’t always ready to receive, moments of grace found in between the cruel chance of having to use a gun and the darker dream of needing to believe we did.

Score: 9/10