On Kelly Reichardt’s First Film, “River of Grass”

Kelly Reichardt’s intimate, anticlimactic features have gradually established her as one of the finest filmmakers on the contemporary independent scene, and as such, the restoration and redistribution of her largely unseen debut, River of Grass, is a welcome chance to fully explore her body of work. And given the large gap between this 1994 debut and Reichardt’s next feature, 2006’s Old Joy, it is especially fascinating to see her talents in their most primal, unrefined state, offering the chance to pore over the early experiment of a director whose subsequent films share close bonds of aesthetic and tone.

From the jump, River of Grass offers several stylistic flourishes that wildly clash with the somber, deliberate pacing and muted palettes of Reichardt’s later work. It begins with a character introduction by way of a cheeky montage of photographs and home videos as Cozy (Lisa Bowman) talks about her childhood, and even includes a grisly but comic 8mm video of a reenactment of the previous owner murdering her husband, her own vented frustrations perhaps a mirror for Cozy’s own as she spends all day cooped up in the garish rectangle of a home. The frenetic, playful tenor of this sequence is matched by the next one, set in a jazz club as a band runs through a hot number and the bartender palms the contents of the register, prompting a cop to give chase and threaten to shoot, only to discover that the thief got his service revolver as well. The editing of this scene, choppy and jittery like a silent film crossed with a low-budget music video, can hardly be squared at all with the at-times oppressively long takes and elegant transitions of Reichardt’s later movies.

As aberrative as the form of the film is compared to the aesthetic of Reichardt’s other movies, so too, sadly, is its often reductive signifiers of social context. One of Reichardt’s strengths lies in her ability to balance reality and thematic significance in working-class, if not destitute, characters without cheapening their humanity. But the characters of River of Grass come off like slick parodies of Florida hicks, and a number of shots take cheap shots at their expense. Cozy lives in the kind of boxy, single-floor homes that dot the state’s hurricane-prone land, and in one shot, she stands on her lawn in the foreground with her house behind; in between the two sits a small playpen with her screaming children inside, the small rectangle of the pen forming a grim simulacrum of their larger living conditions. Earlier than that, Cozy can be seen pouring Coke into her baby’s bottle and her older kids sloppily spooning food out of Tupperware bowls instead of proper dishes. These moments border on poverty porn, never quite mocking but also not fully demarcated from the film’s deadpan sense of humor.

Having said that, Reichardt does capture a certain aspect of Florida with amazing clarity. Venture far enough outside any of the metropolitan or tourist hubs of the state and you can see the color start to bleach from everything, leaving behind the pale blue-green hue that coats houses and even clothes like a chlorine mist. There’s also the subtly observant, early succession of shots that look out of a car window as reedy Everglade swampland becomes drained and bulldozed development before the terraforming completes with elegantly, artificially perfect lines of pine trees hang on either side of the highway like a subtropical Champs-Élysées. And though Reichardt’s depictions of the protagonists as dull white trash are needlessly reductive, they are not entirely dishonest. If nothing else, she ably reflects the small oddities of dress and behavior that suggest that the “No shirt, no shoes” rule originated in Florida, where it remains unheeded to this day.

Gradually, the film’s relations to Reichardt’s filmography start to become visible. Cozy and Lee Ray (Larry Fessenden) are archetypical Reichardt protagonists: at once forced into a peripatetic lifestyle and denied it by a lack of money. The director’s ability to limn character circumstances with scarcely a few seconds can be seen when Lee Ray dumps out the contents of his wallet as a means of introduction to Cozy and produces nothing more than a stamp-sized photo of his mother and just enough cash for laundry day. Reichardt finds a kind of gutter-punk, sub-Chaplinesque comedy in that poverty here, but by the time of, say, Wendy and Lucy, it would blossom into vivid tragedy. The event on which the plot turns, in which Cozy and Lee Ray flee what they believe to be a murder when they screw around with a gun and fire it at someone, is the germinating seed of Night Moves, where gun horseplay becomes willing eco-terrorism tainted by the paranoia that someone might have died in their planned explosion.

Structurally, the film both is and isn’t like its successors. The anticlimax of the protagonists’ shooting is textbook Reichardt, taking genre tropes and removing the expected ending to produce an effect of cognitive dissonance, challenging a viewer by blatantly withholding the expected release. Yet the generally taut nature of the scripting, which constantly loops back on itself so it can come full-circle at the end, is decidedly more traditional a narrative arc than the frayed threads that define the director’s recent films. That the gun in question belongs to Cozy’s father, the aforementioned hapless cop, is a convenience that Reichardt would never write into her scripts today. Nonetheless, there is a forecast of the future in the deflated comedy of the ending, especially for something like Meek’s Cutoff, the peak of Reichardt’s doomed road movies. River of Grass ends almost tidily, where Meek’s pushes further to completely visualize its characters’ directionless journey, thoroughly flouting dramatic structure and ending at a seemingly arbitrary point to induce despair, anger, and fear. Nonetheless, Reichardt almost pulls off something similar here with a final shot of a clogged interstate, the ostensible open-endedness of the road completely subverted by the bumper-to-bumper tedium of driving on the expressway. All of the director’s work is in that shot: always moving, never progressing.