Gerry (2002)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Two friends named Gerry become lost in the desert after taking a wrong turn. Their attempts to find their way home only lead them into further trouble.
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What critics compared Gerry to
It's a variation on what Gus Van Sant has been doing for the last several years with films like Gerry and Last Days, stripping character and narrative down to the most basic requirements and focusing instead on observation in real time.
A better version of Underwater might have kept a bold focus on the rhythm of bodies moving at phenomenal depths through an alien environment, evoking the disembodied, even cosmic quality we so often seek in space films — or that we find in Gus Van Sant's under-appreciated Gerry.
Back in 2003 Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” flummoxed audiences with its strange, off-putting take on two guys lost in the wilderness.
This is a plot for Herzog, but Herzog already magnificently desiccated man's search for Eden for smugness, lunacy and dark rapture in Grizzly Man , and Gus Van Sant already envisioned the wanderer's yearning for cosmic evaporation in Gerry.
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In that regard, it has something in common with Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant, experimental indies that articulated unspoken ideas through atmospherics.
It’s not too long, though, before the film turns into a treacly male weepie, with several face-palm-worthy music cues (Despite Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, it’s about time to retire Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel,” filmmakers) and some truly icky gender politics (all the female characters are oblivious playthings for their male counterparts to manipulate with extratemporal abilities).
Not for him the avant-garde broodiness of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, or even the metaphysical speculations of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man: working alongside cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, he jazzes up proceedings with split screens, neo-psychedelic images, showy camera angles (one shot is taken from the perspective of an empty bottle, which Ralston’s tongue comes at like an angry lizard).