RIVER OF GRASS (1994)

Kelly Reichardt’s debut feature film, River of Grass, is set in the humid, swampy land between Miami and the Florida Everglades. Motorways sprawl and intersect above, while below lies polluted water and green growth that looks like nature is trying to stake its claim on the land. In the blinding white light of it all, it can be hard to tell where the water, grass or sky begin. Cozy (Lisa Donaldson) lives there, a single mother in her thirties whose strung-out narration guides us along. The Native Americans called the area ‘River of Grass’.

“People used to think this area was uninhabitable, but more and more it’s becoming civilised”, she continues, sounding like a tour guide who has long since memorised the script but cannot produce an ounce of feeling for the words. As we drive on, palm trees smother any sense of openness that the terrain promised, the concrete roads weaving through them only providing straight lines in or out. She continues, “They say within two years there will be a shopping centre every fifteen miles”, the sense of irony not lost in her insouciant delivery.

Reichardt, one of the great chroniclers of American ennui, presents this time and place as a spiritual dead-end, but expresses no judgement on the people who live there. They are people trying to find excitement and release, or perhaps even just satisfaction. Cozy, who we learn was named after the jazz drummer, Cozy Cole, seems to feel no affection for her children. Instead, Super 8 mm footage shows us a murder that took place in her home, years before they lived there. Instead of a stifling, bored reality, there are crimes, legends and imagination, however limited.

She escapes the purgatory by pretending; in her room, she performs a gymnastic routine, bowing graciously before an invisible audience. She spins in circles outside the house like a kid on a dull Sunday afternoon. “Did my mother’s life create my destiny? Or does one thing just trigger another?”, her narration wonders. Her father asks: “are you sick or something?”. She seems so. Sick with malaise, sick from the sun and light, and the thick air.

Her father, Jimmy (Dick Russell), is the man who named her Cozy—he used to be a celebrated jazz drummer and is now a crime scene detective. He’s given up one dream to follow the “straight line” of law and order. When Cozy practises her gymnastics, she always seems as if she’s about to topple over, unable to walk the ‘straight line’ her father rigidly sticks to. He still plays the drums in his living room, but without an audience he’s like Cozy, playing to imagined applause.

Reichardt’s cool, sedate style is unobtrusive, but never detached. We ride in passenger seats, and hang out in rancid motel rooms. People tell uneventful (and possibly made up) stories and commit petty crimes. We’re amongst these people, seeing their world as it is—un-romanticised and unexciting. Reichardt meets the drama where it’s, refusing to exaggerate, because these people don’t need exaggeration. She’s like a documentarian who knows that sooner or later people will reveal themselves on camera without the need of any major intervention.

Eventually, Cozy runs into Lee (Larry Fessenden, who also edited River of Grass and is an acclaimed director in his own right) outside of a bar. As an apology for almost running her over, he buys her a drink. Her kids are at home asleep and she’s trudged across grasslands to get to this dive, while Lee, who lives with his mother, is looking for an excuse for some show-and-tell. Lee has come into possession of a gun, which in a strange twist belongs to Cozy’s father—he dropped it whilst chasing a perp. It isn’t long before they’re swimming in a stranger’s pool after dark, Cozy floating in dirty water backlit by aqua blue, dreamy and grimy at the same time. After the homeowner comes out to inspect the noise, the gun is fired, and the couple go on the lam.

But Cozy is the daughter of a father who never made it as a jazz drummer, and who is faring no better as a cop, and likewise she’s no more cut out to be an outlaw than she is a stay-at-home mother. Yet the fantasy persists, even as we learn that not only was their victim not killed, he wasn’t even hit by the bullet. There’s no nationwide man-hunt, their pictures are not up in police stations. When Lee runs into the man that they shot at, he doesn’t even recognise him. Cozy’s father is looking for her, but it isn’t some grand chase. There are no shoot-outs. Even their supposed crime spree is hysterically petty, comprising clothes stolen from washing machines, falsely-refunded bus tickets, and the theft of eleven dollars worth of groceries.

They may think they’re Bonnie and Clyde, but the America of Good and Bad, of arch villainy and heroism, is a relic of a silver screen built on legends and exaggerations, offering very little translation to twenty- and thirty-somethings in the middle of nowhere. They can’t even get the television to work in their motel room. There are no stories being told, no epic journeys, just vaguely-remembered retellings of old legends.

Cozy and Lee don’t possess the sex and danger of Kit and Holly in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). They share little sensuality or lust for each other. They don’t kiss, make love, or talk about their future together. There are no tears or embraces. They are too sealed in their own warped fantasies for that. As Lee, Larry Fessenden is brilliantly off-putting and hard to predict. In one sequence, Cozy sleeps while Lee clutches a bottle and tells a bizarre story from his past. Towards the end of his monologue, a hand reaches out for the bottle—it’s a guy we’ve seen hanging around the motel, Reichardt and editor Fassenden deploying a perfectly timed reveal that he’s sitting in the corner of the room with them listening to the story, as funny as it is depressing.

Lee will tell his stories to anyone who’ll listen, bringing to mind the self-aggrandisement of youth, lies told to impress anyone in earshot, yet rarely yielding so much as eye rolls. As Cozy, Lisa Donaldson maintains a thorny distance, a person floating dreamily behind barbed wire fences. Like Holly in Badlands, she performs routines and in them we sense delusion, and a danger inherent in it. It isn’t innocence corrupted, as it might have been in Holly’s case, but almost-total removal from reality. She might take this crime spree further than Lee after all.

Reichardt’s compositions are filled with a casual beauty that acquiesce to the couple’s daydreams. The film’s most enduring shot looks straight on at Cozy as she tightrope-walks on a wall by the ocean, the sky bright blue and smattered with clouds as she walks with her arms out for balance. It’s one of those sublime images made up of such quotidian components that it’s hard to say what makes it dream-like. It may be the light, the division between street, beach, and ocean, or it may be the whites and blues, but here Reichardt presents Florida as fantasy, a large, outdoor expanse to explore, yet with very little to actually do. In such a place, drifting away and coming back like the ocean, with not even enough money for a tollbooth, what is there to do but play-act?

River of Grass possesses an underlying sense of cosmic fate and destiny. Her father’s gun had to be lost for the two to end up on the run, but more than any coincidence or stroke of luck, it’s circumstance that seems to guide Cozy and Lee’s fate. They have been born in a place of few prospects and little hope of finding self fulfilment. They may end up just like their parents, as any of us might, their outcomes decided by patterns laid out well before their birth. But as much as Cozy and Lee may live in fantasy, their imaginations are limited, their dreams almost non existent.

Here, we can sense the beginning of Reichardt’s pet themes coming to life. Her astounding Meek’s Cutoff (2010) was a Western not of adventure but of lean times and uncertainty. Certain Women (2016) was another study in small-town melancholia, finding longing and blunted dreams amongst pastoral expanses. And in these films, it isn’t a lack of story, or a lack of events, but rather a focus on the daily details of our lives that provide the drama— aluminium Christmas trees and Coca Cola poured into baby’s bottles in River of Grass, lonely cafes and diners in Certain Women, strange locals and lost pets in Wendy and Lucy (2008).

Reichardt’s eye for detail, her gift for extrapolating meaning from the quotidian, is evident from even the opening minutes of River of Grass. It’s a film that contains such striking yet underplayed observations that it’s like reading a good novel, carefully constructed but with a free-flowing, almost effortless touch. River of Grass heralded a major new talent in Reichardt, and while she would go on to make even better films, her debut is a fully-formed, strikingly confident would-be-crime-caper, one that is totally at odds with the then-current state of American Indie Cinema. “It is becoming civilised”, Cozy says. Reichardt knows it isn’t true, and establishes herself instead as a filmmaker unafraid to forge ahead into the wild terrains.

USA | 1994 | 76 MINUTES | 1.33:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

Oscilloscope Laboratories’ 2015 restoration of the film is presented here in 2K from Radiance Films and looks excellent, especially for a film shot on a shoestring budget. The colours of the locales are vibrant, from the dark reds inside the bar to the bleached white roads of Florida. The clarity of the images is striking, especially on close-ups of characters’ faces. You can even spot the layers Cozy has attempted to cut into her wig. The uncompressed PCM stereo audio is evenly presented but really comes to life whenever music is involved. The sequence in which Cozy’s father plays a rattling drum solo is particularly impressive.

• NEW audio interview with writer and curator So Mayer. This was done specifically for Radiance’s release of River of Grass, and as always, is informative, well-researched and an essential watch for anyone interested in Reichardt. Mayer discusses early influences on the director, and provides background on her collaborations with different artists over her career.
• Larry Fessenden: Invisible Man, Renaissance Man, Monstrous Midwife—a visual essay by critic Anton Bitel on the career of actor and producer Larry Fessenden including his work with Reichardt and other independent filmmakers. A another welcome appraisal of an artist, this time Larry Fessenden, whose career is fascinating and admirable. Here we get insight into his working relationship with Reichardt, and the collaborative nature of their endeavours.

Cast & Crew

director: Kelly Reichardt.
writer: Kelly Reichardt (story by Jesse Hartman & Kelly Reichardt).
starring: Lisa Donaldson, Larry Fessenden, Dick Russell, Stan Kaplan & Michael Buscemi.