River of Grass at 30: Kelly Reichardt's Debut Planted Indie Seeds

The False Start River of Grass Planted the Seeds of Kelly Reichardt’s Career

The case is sometimes made that 1994 is the “The Greatest Year in Film History.” It’s in no small part due to the preeminence of a number of IMDb Top 250 list-toppers like The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction. While largely a pedestrian collection, the latter’s reputation is essential in cementing a memory of the ‘90s as a decade of cinematic “independence.” As every year does, 1994 started with Sundance. There were a couple notable debuts: Kevin Smith launched promisingly onto the scene with Clerks, character actor Tom Noonan won the whole show with his directorial debut What Happened Was… and, unfortunately, David O. Russell also competed with his first feature Spanking the Monkey. Most oddly of all though is the first film by someone not often associated with the ‘90s indie film boom: Kelly Reichardt. Her debut River of Grass not only played in the main competition at Sundance, but garnered three Independent Spirit Awards nominations—on top of Reichardt being awarded “Someone to Watch.” While Smith and O. Russell would go on to rapidly climb the early Indiewood ladder, Reichardt faded into obscurity for years after her second feature failed to get off the ground. Yet, 30 years on, River of Grass has more to offer than was apparent at its premiere. It gives us a glimpse at Reichardt’s latent prowess and opens a window to how much Reichardt changed as an artist through her hiatus.

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It opens with a slideshow: Cozy (Lisa Donaldson, née Bowman) lackadaisically narrates her birth, her childhood, her parents and how she came to marry her husband over old home photos. The sequence ends with the story of her home’s previous owner, a woman who “murdered her husband and buried him in the shower wall.” We see Cozy around the house, trapped in domestic boredom as she goes about her daily mothering routines. “Too much daydreaming left me blue,” she says.

At some point she has enough and walks out, almost getting hit by a car near the county line only to run into its driver, Lee (a young, oddly handsome Larry Fessenden), at a dive. Looking for a thrill, they break into a backyard pool. They play with a revolver during their B&E that is, unbeknownst to them, the pistol that Cozy’s policeman father (Dick Russell) lost a couple days prior. When the owner of the house surprises them, Cozy unleashes a bullet and the man falls; they think they’ve killed someone, and they’re now lovers on the run.

It’s a surprising premise given Reichardt’s realist inclinations that burst her back on the scene in 2006 with Old Joy. River of Grass lends its storytelling to Reichardt’s oft-overlooked interest in true crime, which in part likely has its roots in her crime scene photographer father. (Reichardt did her first photography with her dad’s crime scene camera.)

Yet true crime, both through its investigative anthropological interests as well as its emphasis on external factors’ effects on individual psychology, acts as a keystone to Reichardt’s interrogative cinema. At the start of River of Grass, Cozy lies in the bathtub, reflecting on her murder-house: “I often wondered about this woman and what made her act so violently. I guess it wasn’t any one big thing but a lot of little things that just grew deeper and deeper under her skin.” This train of thought, from an inquisitive cop’s daughter, could easily be extrapolated as being from Reichardt herself. We could also as easily see “little things that just [grow] deeper and deeper” under a characters’ skin as applying to the disillusioned 30-something oldheads in Old Joy, frustrated frontier women in Meek’s Cutoff or Dostoyevskian ecoterrorists in Night Moves.

Unlike those later films, River of Grass is also shocking for its stylistic predeparture, with its jazzy, almost New Wave Godardian editing (done by Fessenden) lying in stark contrast to the textured realism Reichardt has become known for. Languid images of lazing about can be interrupted by fast, poppy editing or drumming hi-hats. A bar robbery is presented in rhythmic shot/reverse shot. A revolver firing is pushed almost to abstraction, like when Jean-Paul Belmondo guns down the bike cop in Breathless. It’s almost like the work of a different filmmaker.

In their foundational book Kelly Reichardt, Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour frame River of Grass within the context of a Bonnie and Clyde-reworking resurgence in the ‘90s indie sphere, but I would argue it is more tempting to draw parallels to an American independent filmmaker who also went on sabbatical from the industry: Terrence Malick. In his first feature, Badlands, a young Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen whimsically recreate the Starkweather murder spree as a teenage romantic fantasia. While the parallels are oddly harmonious, both films and the filmmakers are better examined for their difference.

First, Malick’s stepping away from New Hollywood was apparently self-imposed, whereas Reichardt’s had much more to do with circumstance, leaving her couch surfing around New York. (However, Reichardt’s inter-feature era was more filmic than many assume; she directed 8mm film Ode and experimental shorts Then a Year and Travis that helped her hone her editing craft.) Second, what further separates these lovers-on-the-run debuts, despite their similar flights of naïve fancy, is their impetus. Malick’s teenage disaffection is fueled at once by small-town boredom and literal patriarchal repression, whereas Reichardt’s narrator (despite also being contextualized with a single father figure) is a married adult with children. If Malick’s romance is characterized by possibility leading to desire, then Reichardt’s is characterized by the distinct lack of possibility and the inability to escape. It’s not a youthful romantic fantasy that sends Cozy on the lam, but the million tiny deaths that come from living under the full weight of the adult world.

Cozy and Lee’s attempts to gain a modicum of agency—be that the ability to change the world around them (through violence) or simply just navigate it (through movement)—leaves them spinning their wheels in a cheap motel on the Dade/Broward County lines. They’re broke, living day-to-day on dollars, and River of Grass starts to look more like a Reichardt film we would recognize.

Starting in the motel, River of Grass becomes driven not by plot, but by interaction, both between the confined characters and their environment. The pace adopts a new listlessness—while they’re seemingly on the run, they’re not going anywhere fast. One of the best scenes involves breaking into Lee’s mom’s house to steal records to sell for a quick buck. It’s not so much a heist scene as it is a quiet, curious exploration by Cozy of a domestic space. Indeed, their crime spree seems to have the same circuity as Reichardt’s later roads, where paths through the northwestern woods and deserts don’t seem to physically go any further than where they started, but traverse massive psychological journeys along the way. In her native Florida, it is no different for Reichardt’s characters, even if the story is a bit more sensational.

In a last ditch effort to finally leave South Florida, Cozy and Lee run through a toll booth. A cop pulls them over. Cozy thinks this is it, they’re going to be locked up forever for murder, like at the end of Badlands when the police finally catch up to Kit and Holly and it seems like there’s nowhere left to run on the prairie. There is no warrant out for their arrest, though, and they didn’t murder anyone. The cop simply explains that if they don’t have the quarter to pay the toll, they have to turn back around where they came from. It is a total breakdown of the self-aggrandizing psychology of the narrative. Maybe their crime spree wasn’t so important after all, and maybe the world isn’t out to get them so much as it is indifferent to them.

It’s a turn of fate that seems to befall most of Reichardt’s characters—Kurt (Will Oldham) at the end of Old Joy sees himself practically fading into the environment of a post-industrial Portland; Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) finds nothing but an apathetic desert in the abrupt conclusion of Meek’s Cutoff; Josh reaches total spiritual destitution when his dam bombing fails to save the world in Night Moves. This indifference, too, resonates with Reichardt’s career. While she is now hailed as “cinema’s foremost poet of the American Northwest,” it took her a long time to get the mainstream indie acclaim she has now. Yet, she still has to teach to get health care. It has always been an uphill battle to get any of her films off the ground in an industry as apparently indifferent to art as the worlds her characters inhabit are to them. The false start of her career with River of Grass was no doubt discouraging, and saw Reichardt re-emerge over a decade later as an ostensibly different kind of filmmaker, but the seeds of what make her one of America’s best were there from the beginning.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.

The False Start River of Grass Planted the Seeds of Kelly Reichardt’s Career