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 their environmental 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 their 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 gang …. 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 being 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.
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