“Night Moves” is why people hate environmentalists

Welcome to Green Screen, where Grist writers put on their proverbial cinephile hats to talk about movies, television, video games, and any heretofore undiscovered media on two-dimensional surfaces. This week, Assistant Editor Amelia Urry, Senior Editor Lisa Hymas, and Editorial Fellow Sara Bernard turn their sights on Kelly Reichardt’s new movie, Night Moves, which was released on DVD this week. 

The basics: Two young greenies, Josh and Dena, get angsty about the environment and decide to turn eco-saboteur with the help of a shady former Marine, by conspiring to blow up a dam in Oregon — allegedly to save the salmon, since the ocean “will be empty by 2048,” or something. (You can watch the trailer here.)

Why it’s green: When you were a pimpled teenager running your high school’s Sierra Club chapter, you almost certainly never considered that a “save-the-trees” mentality could be a bad thing. If that adolescent naiveté hasn’t been resoundingly crushed already, Night Moves is here to do it for you. Also, there’s no better way to say, “We’re making a movie about outdated environmentalist ideals,” than to set it in the outskirts of good ol’ Eugene, Ore.

Amelia: First of all, fair warning: This is one of those films that people who hate indie films will almost certainly hate — it’s reticent and melancholy, studded with long pauses and nearly expressionless staring contests with the camera by some extremely unheroic heroes. Said heroes, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning, also happen to be exactly the kind of environmentalists that non-environmentalists will probably hate: withdrawn misanthropes who care more about the fate of hypothetical salmon than any of the flesh-and-blood people around them. (Not to mention the uncategorizeable third conspirator, played by Peter Saarsgard, who helps organize the dam sneak attack while somehow giving off the impression that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, or doesn’t care.)

Still, it would be wrong to call Night Moves an environmental movie. It is more a darkly drawn psychological thriller, nearly devoid of slogan or rallying cry — to its benefit. If the movie were as earnest about its message as its main characters are, it would actually be unwatchable. [Sara: True, it’d be totally barf-worthy — though could anything have been as barf-worthy as The Secret?] [Lisa: You actually watched The Secret??]

Lisa: Well, OK, I agree with Sara and Amelia that the film does capture some (tragically) realistic eco-culture — there is one scene where an earnest group is watching an earnest documentary about environmental catastrophe and then asking the director earnest questions — too real! I’ve been at many such events. Also, I think Josh’s naiveté is realistic, when he says that he thinks blowing up a dam will force people to start thinking about their wonton, wasteful ways. Yeah, good luck with that, kid.

Amelia: I think the green-inclined can still eke some useful lessons from this film — namely, don’t be a jerk and have concrete goals! Armed with a deathly serious commitment to a dangerously vague mission, these would-be activists serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when people fail to think of their actions as having real consequences.

“So … what do we do?” one character asks pointedly at that film-within-a-film screening, effectively summing up these enviros’ meta-dilemma in one fell, inarticulate swoop. Asking the question is a good first step, but if this movie had any coherent lesson — other than beware of saunas and brooding asocial farmers — it is that it can be dangerously easy to mistake doing something, anything, for doing the right thing.