Gerry (2003)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Instant Favorite.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

There's a good chance the film will make you laugh out loud, but if it doesn't, there's an even better chance it will make you openly sob.

There aren't many movies that manage to be as polarizing as Gus van Sant's Gerry. A quick look through what the Internet has to say about this movie will lead you into a string of two types of reviews: people dismissing this movie as one of the most boring, tedious, presumptuous, empty and self indulgent movies of the century, and another group of individuals placing the film on a pedestal as one of the most reflexive, profound and beautiful work of art they have ever seen. Nevertheless, this proves that Gerry brings out strong emotions from whoever watches it, be it negative or positive ones. The premise for this film is so absurdly simple that it is almost nonexistent: two friends (both named Gerry) drive to a desert landscape in order to see "it", give up and get lost on their way back to the car. I have to confess my special love for films with no real plot, they tend to be the most interesting watches. And Gerry is nothing if not an interesting watch. In this personal project, van Sant takes away all the superfluous and leaves only the essential, following a minimalistic approach throughout the entire film. There's nothing that can possibly distract the viewer because there is literally nothing else there, only the landscape and its natural sounds, the two characters and the spectator following their journey. As such, the film lends itself as a blank canvas on which the viewer can paint their own interpretation of what appears on the screen: what this journey is about, why these two men seem determined to find their way and yet are so intent on getting hopelessly lost, what do their conversations mean, what is their relationship (if they have one at all)... As such, viewers expecting a plot and trying to extract logical explanations will be severely disappointed. This film will only make sense to those who are able to project their own personal journey on that of the characters and extract a meaning from it. The beautiful cinematography and never ending sequence shots serve as a therapeutic session of stillness and calmness in a time when we are, more than ever, bombarded with fast images and dynamic scenes. We are no longer asked to think of what we are feeling or experiencing, films tend to tell us what emotion is required at each moment, so we don't have to risk being bored a single second. Gerry is a much needed dose of reflective art in an ever more chaotic cinematic world. The mistake I believe people have made when judging this film is making a critique of the vagueness of its message or lack thereof, attributing it to an empty and slow paced story that bores the viewer to sleep. But this emptiness is precisely what we can use to make Gerry's journey ours: do we find our way out of the desert or do we give up and succumb just as help was coming? This film serves as an example of how to make a movie that as no meaning and all meanings at the same time. It's useless to ask ourselves what van Sant, Affleck and Damon were trying to convey, because it was probably something different for each of them. Of course these films will always be judged harshly, but they are also necessary cinematic experiments, as they force us to retreat into ourselves and search for our own individual truths. And this is precisely what I learned from Gerry. We all have doubts and questions that need answering, and we can use cinema and art to express those questions in order to find the answers, at the same time asking the question to other people so they, in turn, will come up with different answers.

This is quite possibly the most boring film I've ever watched... and it took me three attempts to get to the end because it is a fantastic film for sending you to sleep.SPOILER ALERT: Not sure if this counts as a spoiler or not... but the film consists of 10 minutes of two blokes walking followed by 10 minutes of a close up on the faces of two blokes walking followed by 1 minute of very brief dialogue followed by 10 minutes of two blokes walking followed by 10 minutes of 360 degree panoramic shot of the scenery followed by 10 minutes close up on the faces of two blokes walking followed by 10 minutes of one bloke on a rock followed by 5 minutes on top of a hill followed by 10 minutes of walking followed by 10 minutes lying down in the sun The end The lack of dialogue, the lack of anything, and the rhythmic sound of marching just sends you to sleep.Just an awful film. There is literally nothing good to say about the film. I can only think that positive reviews are from people who have a thing for one of the two actors because there are a lot of close ups of them walking. There is a homo-erotic feel to the film that might be why it gets some positive responses from those who like that kind of thing but except that... what was the point of this film?

This is one of the slowest movies I've seen in a while.One way to describe the majority of the long and still takes is to say that they are basically photographs but with slights signs of movement - which makes it beautiful to look at for such a long while.At the end of the movie, I came to the conclusion that its purpose was to make the viewer an merely observer of the landscape but not in a submissive way, since we are the ones responsible to add some meanings to this reticent plot.(I also thought that the scenes were so lethargic that it was almost like playing backwards... Which gave me the idea of watching it again fast-rewinding the hole movie. Haven't done it yet, but probably will see some interesting results, who knows.)

Gerry will not be for everyone... although that's a pretty big understatement. It moves at a snail's pace, it has a very minimal plot, it has very few editing choices... and all of that is exactly the type of film that appeals to me. Both of the leads are pretty strong, although Affleck considerably moreso. He's a very talented performer who's always filled with the inside of his character and who's naturalism is a benefit in all of his films. He's the reason I sought this out and I was not disappointed. I'm not too familiar with Gus Van Sant's work besides Milk, but his directing is key here. This is a pretty strong film all around, despite there being so little.