Old Joy

Old Joy **

"Old Joy" is a male bonding experience, with hardly any actual male bonding. It's 75 minutes long, with so many long driving shots, that anyone with a short attention span should look elsewhere. Having patience will not end up being rewarding, and you'll leave the theater feeling that you could have done something else with your time. It has such a thin plot, that I don't even have to put it into a separate paragraph. It starts off with a man, Mark, who is on the phone with his old friend Kurt. Kurt has to take a little camping trip to Portland, Oregon, to check out a few hot springs for some reason or the other. He convinces his pregnant wife Tanya to let him go on for the night, and he will return the following afternoon. Mark goes to pick up Kurt, who is more like an aimless drifter than a person with any actual plans in life. He wanders from place to place. And the two begin their road trip, where they reignite their old friendship, and prepare for the end of it as well. They make it into the wilderness, when true revelations are made.

The visuals in "Old Joy," and I mean the wilderness scenes, are absolutely stunning to look at. At one point in the film, Mark makes a comment, saying that sometimes by living in the city, you forget that all of this is out there. The forest is a world unto its own, and something that I know very little about. There are some amazing shots to see, of the mountains and the rivers, and the sunset. The problem simply is that the film needs a bit more. Half of it seemed like filler. For example, the driving shots, which go on for multiple minutes at a time. I could feel my eyelids getting heavier as the minutes went on. And it's a shame, because this story was ripe for deep dialogues, and more developed characters. The screenwriter didn't take advantage of his plot or story, and seems to ignore it. There is some political commentary, mostly about Bush(surprise!) and I'm almost positive that there was a gay undertone in the next to last scene, but I still can't place my finger on what actually happened. When its over, you realize that you know nothing about these two people. They hardly even talk to one another, and the little that we do know isn't enough to come up with a logical conclusion about their friendship. It could be possible that they won't be ever seeing each other again. However close their friendship was in the past, it will never be the same as they are in totally different worlds. While Mark is about to be a father, and about to literally settle down and start a family, Kurt doesn't want to stop his lifestyle of roaming around from place to place like a nomad. But, everything is so minimal, that I couldn't even care about anything that happens. The two friends go on a trip one day, and return the next. Not a whole lot. Will Oldham, a singer/songwriter who I've never heard of before, plays Kurt, and steals the show. He brings a little bit of brightness compared to Mark, who basically just sits straight ahead and delivers his lines with the most wooden presentation. "Old Joy" needs to be a little longer, and a little more plot and action. I don't mind slow films, but this one doesn't deserve to be this slow. It's too short, and needs to tell some kind of story, one worth telling.