In Brief: With all due respect to Kelly Reichardt’s latest, there will only ever be one Night Moves– this brilliant, fractious, mosaic of existential crisis that encapsulates both man and nation. ****
source: Netflix
“I watched a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry.”
So says Night Moves‘ protagonist Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman). His derision is hardly meant to be taken seriously. After all, the new American cinema of the 70s, buoyed by the likes of Coppola, Scorsese, and De Palma, made no secret of its European influences. Although less often recalled than those other directors, Arthur Penn was a major figure of the time too, having just a few years earlier helped to take the censorious Hays Production Code out back and riddle it with bullets, so to speak. His 1967 incarnation of Bonnie and Clyde, a film set during The Great Depression but unmistakably invoking contemporary America, would play a critical role in expanding Hollywood’s allowed themes and visual vocabulary.
Perhaps it’s easiest to just say that Hackman’s character has no time for the airy pretenses of the Nouvelle Vague. He’s a straight-shooter and a born detective, at least since his football career faltered. Sleuthing is all he can be proud of now, even as it precipitates his downfall. It grants him neither happiness nor contentment, as his wife strays with another man, but it is in his blood. Its process affords him a lens through which to structure his world. Unfortunately this lens brings only the ‘how’ of others’ actions into focus. The underlying ‘why’ remains ever elusive. He is tasked with tracking a sexually-liberated teenage run-away (an almost unrecognisably young Melanie Griffith) and so he is compelled to ponder the clues, even as the truth he unearths leaves no one better off. Such weary fatalism invites ready comparison to Polanski’s Chinatown. They are both dyed in the wool neo-noir and were produced near-contemporaneously. They feel like siblings, overlapping to affirm their pedigree but bearing enough differences to establish their independence.
Some things are best left consigned to the shadows. If the film’s finale tips violently into convenient tragedy, fatally tying together so many disparate characters, it works perfectly as poetry and allegory. Night Moves doesn’t so much expose a crime, or series thereof, so much as track a group of drifters as they slip helplessly over the edge of the Earth. The inference is one carried throughout the counter-cultural movement. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, a nation realised it was listing, caught in an extended lament between longing for the simple, “good-old” days and recognising that the future was wide open and unclaimed, a prospect simultaneously electrifying and terrifying.
We conclude with a boat, miles from civilisation, churning the endless waters as it spins in circles, away from the control of its sole inhabitant. Night Moves draws its title from a chess scenario, where a win is possible in three moves by sacrificing the queen and leaving the knights to close in. This possibility was, once upon a time, missed by a player, a decision Moseby assumes must have haunted him for the rest of his days. He will miss his own checkmate in time, but the unravelling started long before that. Although not talked about much these days, indeed perhaps most often recalled for its tongue-in-cheek barb against Rohmer, Night Moves remains a vital product of 70s American cinema. The lack of critical plaudits serves only to highlight its quiet desperation.
Concentric Ocelot Party 