“It’s funny how a single day can drag while entire years go by in a flash,” sighs Cozy (Lisa Bowman), the narrator of Kelly Reichardt’s debut film River of Grass. Ain’t that the truth. It was made in 1994 but you might say Cozy is already in her own private lockdown. An unhappily married mother of two, she fills her baby’s bottle with Coca-Cola and spends long afternoons yearning for the day when some nice couple in a station wagon will arrive to take the children off her hands. One night, she absconds to a bar where she meets Lee (Larry Fessenden), a loner with a high forehead and wild tendrils of hair. They flee into the night together, climb a fence and splash around in a stranger’s swimming pool. When the homeowner finds them, Lee lets his gun do the talking, turning himself and Cozy into the Bonnie and Clyde of the Florida Everglades.
Among those on their tail is Cozy’s father, Jimmy (Dick Russell), a detective and part-time jazz drummer. (He named his daughter after “Cozy” Cole, the African American sticksman who played with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.) Jimmy has his own woes. Like Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, he’s lost his gun. In fact, it’s his pistol that has found its way into Lee’s possession, which means he’s lost his weapon and his daughter to the same man.
Still, he shouldn’t fret: after all, it would be hard to think of a couple less committed to being on the lam. They hide out in a $20-a-night motel where they take naps and use their feet to pass joints to one another. The height of drama comes when Lee uses a Bible to squash a cockroach. “Did you kill it?” Cozy asks. He’s not sure. “Give me another Bible!” he demands.
The days drift by. At one point, Lee even returns to the scene of the crime, which is when he discovers what we already know: that there was no murder. The “victim” is right as rain. Cozy is crestfallen. “If we weren’t killers, we weren’t anything,” she says in a flat, affectless voiceover inherited from Sissy Spacek in Badlands. Murder isn’t the only crime that Lee and Cozy have failed at. Lee’s attempt to steal from a convenience store is interrupted by a more decisive and committed bandit. He also tries to drive through a tollgate only to slam on the brakes at the last minute. Soon, Cozy is wondering whether he even killed that cockroach.
River of Grass takes its title from the Native American description of the Everglades and tellingly keeps any characters of colour largely on the sidelines, looking on suspiciously or in bafflement at these white wastrels floundering around. The movie belongs to that wry category of films about crimes that never were – file it alongside Best Laid Plans, a thriller, starring Reese Witherspoon, in which nobody dies, or the Mexican gem I’m Gonna Explode, about a teenage tearaway who goes on the run but gets no further than the roof of his own apartment block.
Reichardt, who didn’t make another feature after this for 12 years, hadn’t yet found her voice when she directed River of Grass; it feels like a film made under the influence of Jim Jarmusch (who later cast Fessenden in Broken Flowers and The Dead Don’t Die) or the Godardian Hal Hartley. But it’s fascinating nevertheless to see an early version of the lyrical mood that would lend her later movies, such as Meek’s Cutoff and Certain Women, their particular plangent glow.
What it does share with her mature work is dry humour and a vivid sense of place. She brings to Florida the same aural and visual detail with which she would later capture Oregonian life. The streets are dilapidated, paint peeling from every surface, colourless skies looming over featureless landscapes. Even when a shot borders on the beautiful, in the image of a pink-smudged sunset, Reichardt and her cinematographer Jim Denault make sure to include a parking lot in the bottom of the frame to undercut any picture-postcard effect.
This is a film that misleads us right from its opening minutes, beginning in documentary mode before proving to be nothing of the sort. Cozy mentions early on that she spends much of her time daydreaming, so is the whole adventure something she concocted to pass another uneventful day? The scene in which these non-criminals finally part ways suggests as much. There’s talk of boundaries both physical and moral in River of Grass, and the picture itself straddles the line between cataclysmic, life-changing events and same-old, same-old. It’s an ideal streaming treat while we wait for Reichardt’s Berlin film festival hit First Cow to emerge from lockdown limbo and into our woozy new world.
River of Grass is streaming on Amazon Prime in the US and UK
