Everyday People Search For Escape In River of Grass

Cozy (Lisa Donaldson) is living an unfulfilling life. It's not necessarily a bad life, taking care of her kids in a suburban Florida neighborhood, doing her yoga and taking care of the house, but it is a life that leaves her constantly wanting more. Acting on those urges to expand her horizons, she decides to make an impromptu trip to a local bar where she meets up with Lee (Larry Fessenden). The two of them drink, chat and then go to a backyard pool that Lee's friend owns. While clowning around with Lee's gun, the duo hear a figure moving in the dark and startled Cozy fires off the weapon. Mistakenly thinking they killed somebody (the bullet didn't hit anybody), Cozy and Lee proceed to go on the lam, leaving nary even a note behind for their loved ones to explain what's happened to them.



River of Grass was the first directorial effort for writer/director Kelly Reichardt and in some ways, it's a perfect precursor for what was to come in her work. As was explored in an L.A. weekly piece from 2011, the protagonist of River of Grass being an avenue to explore "...the frustrations of the disenfranchised..." would continue in her subsequent works Meek's Cuttoff and Wendy and Lucy. A melancholy tone that permeates her later works is certainly in abundance in River of Grass. Kelly Reichardt's writing and direction is skilled in a number of respects but the way she's capable of making the sorrow of her characters so effectively detectable on a visual level is one of her best traits. You can feel the downcast demeanor clutching Cozy's soul in the way Reichardt films her humdrum daily suburban routine.

However, River of Grass actually has a number of traits that set it heavily apart from the rest of Reichardt's filmography. This dark comedy crime yarn about imperfect Southern criminals frequently channels Blood Simple and even Bottle Rocket in its tone while Reichardt's script has a much more expansive scope than I've seen in her work up to this point (apparently her 2016 effort Certain Women has a similarly expanded storytelling sensibility). Whereas Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy followed just one lead character in media res with only hints of what their past entailed, River of Grass hops across numerous perspectives in the course of its plot.

Much of the story is told from the viewpoint of Cozy, of course, which includes voice-over narration and on-screen visuals like old photographs that see her explaining her upbringing to the viewer. But we also spend plenty of time with Cozy's police officer father as well as standalone sequences with Lee and his friends. Though River of Grass hops across a small group of subplots, it's still a small-scale feature that uses its more intimate nature very much to its advantage. Hopping to different points-of-view allows the viewer the chance to get to know who these people and their motivations are, particularly Cozy and Lee, both of whom have their individual plights rendered in such detail that one can see why they'd find the idea of going on the run such an attractive prospect.

There are even the fascinating suggestions that maybe in their heart of hearts they know there's a chance they could be innocent, but as Leaves of Grass has made abundantly clear, both have been looking for an exit from their current lives and now here's an excuse to do just that! Exploring the perspectives of these two would-be outlaws requires Leaves of Grass, in another departure from Reichardt's future primarily visual-oriented directorial endeavors, to rely quite a bit on dialogue, especially for the aforementioned wistful voice-over work that allows Cozy to divulge her past to the audience. Heavy use of dialogue turns out to work just fine for this particular story, much like in Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, voice-over dialogue in Leaves of Grass is used as a way for a member of a silenced marginalized community to have their voice heard by the audience.

Plus, it's not all wall-to-wall dialogue here. Reichardt does show a gift for the kind of visual-centered dialogue-free storytelling that would make her future directorial works so riveting in numerous scenes of Leaves of Grass. This is especially apparent in the final scene of the whole motion picture, which leaves both Cozy and the viewer in silence in response to an act of violence she's just committed. It's a brutal ending, one that has much of its power derived from the fact that Reichard refuses to have any dialogue accompany the moment, instead leaving both Cozy and the audience to just soak it in with no dialogue to distract either party. It's such a powerful ending that it feels like it's cut from the same cloth of that iconic final scene of Jeanne Dielman 23 Commerce Quay 1080 Brussels in having a solitary act of carnage serve as the moment of release for repressed rage from a female protagonist who has had her own humanity stifled. It's rare that directors can have their feature film debut echo iconic works of Chantal Akerman, but then again, Leaves of Grass isn't just the directorial debut of any o'l filmmaker, it's the directorial debut of Kelly Reichardt!