Gerry is a 2002 American drama film written and directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring and co-written by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. It is the first installment of Van Sant's "Death Trilogy", three films based on deaths that occurred in real life and is succeeded by Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005).
Gerry follows two hiking companions who both go by the name "Gerry". "Gerry" is also a slang term, used by both protagonists throughout the misadventure, meaning "to screw up". Van Sant revealed in interviews that Damon, Affleck, and his brother Ben had already coined the term prior to the title being chosen.
Gerry is frequently cited as an example of non-narrative cinema.
Plot
In 1999, two men, both called Gerry, drive to a remote location to hike at a site marked "Wilderness Trail". As they start, they see some other hikers passing by. In order to not be bothered by these hikers, they decide to go off-trail. After some walking, talking, and an impromptu foot race, they decide to head back. Before long, they realize that they are lost. That night, they build a campfire.
Over the next couple of days, the two hikers wander through the wilderness without food or water. They try to split up for a while, retrace their steps and follow some animal tracks, all to no avail. They grow increasingly irritated with each other as the situation becomes dire.
They eventually find themselves slowly walking mostly in silence through a desert. They finally collapse due to fatigue and dehydration. The weaker of the two (Affleck) proclaims that he is "leaving" and reaches towards Damon's character. Damon's character rolls on top of Affleck and wordlessly strangles him before collapsing again.
After some time, Damon's character awakens and realizes that a highway is not far away. In the final sequence, he is badly sunburned but watches the passing landscape from the car of the father and son who have seemingly rescued him.
Production
The inspiration for the film was the real-life murder of David Coughlin, which Damon related to Van Sant, in which Coughlin and his best friend got lost in the desert, with the latter eventually killing Coughlin.
Besides the news item, other influences include Van Sant's own experience getting lost Initially Van Sant planned to shoot the film with digital video, which he said would have resembled "a John Cassavetes film in the desert".
The film is notable for its lack of dialogue. Initially Van Sant "thought we were definitely going to have a lot of long bits of soul-searching dialogue." During shooting this never came to pass, and Van Sant asserted that the long silences were "our version" of such dialogue.
Critical reception
The film received generally mixed critical reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 61%, based on 100 reviews, with an average rating of 6.20/10. The website’s critics consensus states that Gerry is "The type of uncompromising film that divides filmgoers over whether it is profound or pretentious." Metacritic, using a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 54 out of 100 based on 31 reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
See also
- Narrativity