Night Moves (2013) Reviews

• Slow paced, yet authentic...

  El_Dudness2014-09-16

  I was actually surprised after watching this movie, having firstly noticed the given low ratings. Starting with the characters, the difference in the way each one of them feels about the environmental problems is clear and straightforward. While Harmon, being an ex-con, performs his role in a more detached way, Dena, and mainly Josh, possess deep feelings about them. Dena learnt about them and made up her mind supported in what she claims to be scientific facts. Josh appears to have a more romantic and purist approach, despite his paranoid outbreaks and trust problems. This actually helps the viewer to start building an idea about how each one of these characters will react to the approaching outcome. OK, it is a slow paced movie, which I don't see as something necessarily bad. Actually, I think it contrasts beautifully with the sentiment of urgency that the problem demands and which they want people to acknowledge. Also, about the kind of numbness in Josh expressions during almost all the scenes, I simply cannot see them as emotionless or empty. I rather think (and felt) that he was the most engagingly involved and disturbed about environmental unbalances, almost in a traumatized way, which I think is reinforced by some plan shots, silent and numbing, taking a few more seconds than we are used to. Ultimately, it is a movie about the human condition, about good people, with good reasons, doing wrong things.

• Guilt is what you feel before you do something wrong

  cekadah2014-09-06

  Way too many negative reviews of this excellent production of cinematic art! I must speak out and state my opinion of this movie. It has little to do with radical environmentalism, as so many believe. Instead it is a story that deals with the lack of guilt and then the overwhelming feeling of remorse for a wrong committed. The plot line is about three idealistic youths who are too immature to realize the consequences of their actions in creating a destructive environmental statement . Director Kelly Reichardt has Jesse Eisenberg as 'Josh', Dakota Fanning as 'Dena', and Peter Sarsgaard as 'Harmon'. Josh, Dena, and Harmon are best described as politically committed environmentalist. We are not given much information on each characters background, we know they are sensitive individuals because they care about the natural process of things around them. The Harmon character is the wild card and the leader of the other two. Harmon has a military background which makes him suspect from the start - if he cared about the environment why would he join the military - which is more about destruction than preservation. Their idea to destroy a dam is half baked at best because it is made clear, after the fact, that destroying one dam on the river is futile as there are many dams along the course of the river. When Josh, Dena, and Harmon realize this they are consumed by regret for their foolish action and the fear of being caught. Harmon tells them to communicate in no way. Harmon disappears, Dena becomes a nervous wreck as shown by her case of hives, and Josh becomes paranoid and irrational. Night Moves is a study in the human condition. We as individuals seldom consider the far reaching consequences of our hateful actions, and individuals create societies, societies create nations. I believe Kelly Reichardt has made a clear statement on our world today. Just because this story only shows the actions of three people their actions had far reaching consequences on innocent others. The same statement can be made about nations and their actions against other nations. And what is achieved in the end - destruction, death, fear, and paranoia. At the end of the movie we see Josh becoming a nonperson and having to look over his shoulder from fear. In the mirror he has no reflection but he can see other people. Who's friend and who's foe?

• Three eco-terrorists suffer unintended consequences

  maurice_yacowar2014-08-21

  Night Moves is about unintended consequences. In the first scene an earnest filmmaker shows her earnest ecological documentary to an audience that worries the film may turn people off environmental their concerns. The enormity of the problem may breed despair. Not to make that mistake, Kelly Reichardt makes her film a breathtaking suspense thriller. In Oregon two brothers and a rich daddy's girl blow up a dam. They intend this as an attack on the capitalist corporation that is sacrificing the salmon so people can talk on the cell phones. In the pure Hitchcock moment, just after they've left the bomb-boat stuck to the dam, they espy a distant cop studying the situation. They freeze, then decide to go back to arrest their plan. In that moment we make our commitment. We want them to let the bomb work. As we want Marion Crane's car to take that last, gurgling drop in the Psycho swamp and Marnie not to get caught by that cleaning woman during her robbery. We get our way, though we only hear not see the dam get blown up real good. It's a low budget — but artful — film. The plan isn't especially well thought out. Idealists are like that. Nobody reads it the way it was intended. Correctly, a colleague at hero Josh's gardening co-op dismisses it as Theatre not Politics. Worse, a camper sleeping out is drowned by the flood. That throws both Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Dena (Dakota Fanning) into conscience issues. When she starts blabbing he kills her at her spa job. How did Rabbie Burns put it? The best planned lays of mice and men…. Something like that. Josh's older brother Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) is the worldlier bro, an ex-con, pragmatic enough to bed Dena when Josh goes out for their pizza. As the rich girl provides the $10k to buy the doomed boat, Dena seems light as a revolutionary, acting out a thrilling role. They make Josh seem the purer idealist and his intended murder all the more disturbing. Killing the girl strips him of any virtue. He can properly call the drowning an accident but not this suffocation in the steam room. Harmon advises Josh to get really lost, to disappear. The last shot pretends he has. Applying for a job in a camping goods store, he loses his confidence when confronted with a form to fill out. It asks what other names he's worked under. As if it knows. The film closes on a shot of the store's long aisle window. Josh isn't in it, as if his old nature evaporated in that steam room smother. The few people we see there are yapping on their cell phones, impervious to the initial environmental concerns, with no other function but — as any mirror scene does — give us pause for reflection. My favourite line is Harmon's "Cash, that's the poor people's money." Rich people don't need cash because they can charge everything down to the future, including the cost of tomorrow's salmon for today's energy. It's the poor who don't have a future, no credit, so have to pay as they go. It's no longer the meek who will inherit the earth. The title -- also the name of a fine Arthur Penn flick -- is the name the couple gives the boat they bought for the escapade. The thing about unintended consequences is that they make everything we do, however carefully planned out and executed, moves made in the night, the darkness, without any certainty or clarity. When you take your position you take your chances. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.

• Moves

  santiencalidaddeque2014-04-20

  Okay...I was expecting more. All the movie is about the plan. A clearly stupid and poor plan. We even don't know why they are doing that. We actually don't know anything about the characters because everything is silent and green. And that leads us to a non transparent story, full of holes and doubts. Dialogs are nearly abstract, very plain. Eisenberg can't convince us he is kind of a criminal. There's no tension and that makes it more boring. Then, the characters change, product of a particular situation (which was patently predictable)and we are expecting the characters to be real human beings, but...they are not. And then the movie ends. There's no much more. And...OK.

• Better than I expected

  sfdphd2015-07-21

  To appreciate this film, you have to be prepared for the work of Kelly Reichart, whose films tend to be slow-moving and thought-provoking. You have to be in the mood for that type of experience. For this particular film you also have to be prepared for an emotional reaction to the story of several people who take political action, violent action, and suffer its human costs. Anyone who was young during the 1960's and 1970's will remember what it was like to debate those political issues. We all had to decide whether we were willing to take action in which someone might get hurt. Or in the jargon of Star Trek, does the life of one outweigh the life of many? It's a question we still grapple with today. If you are willing to confront those questions, and your own answers, this film will interest you. If you don't like to think about such things, skip this film and watch something more superficial.