I watched another movie: Gerry

Gerry may be the first film I've seen in which all of the named characters are named Gerry. It's a good film, but it's not for everybody … including, perhaps, me. The premise is pretty simple: two guys go for a hike in the desert without food or water and get lost. Reminds me of a student summary of Hemingway's masterpiece “Big Two-Hearted River”: “Nick goes fishing.”

Folks, Gerry moves slowly. Partway through it you'll be praying for Michael Berryman and company to show up and sort things out. Or maybe some giant radiated desert ants to tear open an Airstream trailer in search of sugar packets as in Them! (the exclamation point tells you the movie is exciting!). But if so, you're looking at Gerry the wrong way. Instead of reading the film as a “things go wrong in the desert” film, how about looking it in the context of the dramatically overrated Blair Witch Project … or maybe the equally overrated if marginally less annoying Open Water? Or, uh, Koyaanisqatsi without the kickass soundtrack. The last one's a stretch, but there are lots of lingering, unromantic shots of desert here that would have gone well with a Philip Glass soundtrack.

Matt Damon is good here, as he often is, but the real surprise was Frankie Muniz. Wait, what? Oh, uh, yeah, Casey Affleck. Not such a surprise, actually, if you saw Gone, Baby, Gone … because he was pretty great in that. The character stuff is pretty subtle, even more so because it seems like Gus Van Sant just turned Damon and Affleck loose and let them improvise. You never really notice how seldom people in movies seem to be listening to each other until you see a film like this, where the actors have to be listening to each other and have to decide how to respond. You can see the same things in Jim Jarmusch's best films as well. I'm not saying it's necessary; one of my favorite films of all time is His Girl Friday, and there's not a lot of listening going on there!

I've read some bizarre interpretations of this film that argue that there's only one Gerry, but I don't buy them. Do I get any bonus points for talking about Gus Van Sant without even attempting a Lynyrd Skynyrd joke?