Certainly worth a look

Released a month prior to Gus Van Sant’s critically acclaimed Elephant, Gerry was given a limited cinema release and then consequently overshadowed by its successor.

However both films can be seen as return to form by a director whom at one point in his career had seemed to have been in lost in Hollywood to the same extent that his characters in Gerry are lost in the desert. Van Sant had appeared to have lost his way, making bland sentimental Hollywood fair such as Finding Forester and Good Will hunting, not to mention the laughable Psycho remake.

Gerry can be seen as the antithesis of his recent efforts, like Elephant, Gerry is not conventional film in any sense. It has a more poetic quality much like the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bella Tarr, with an aesthetic that focuses on the beauty and vastness of nature. Van Sant shoots the actors in way emphasises the hopeless desperation that they are feeling against such vast desolate landscapes.

The film also evokes Van Sants earlier work such as Drugstore Cowboy and in particular My Own private Idaho, with it s beautiful camerawork focusing on the world around the characters, the speed up imagery of clouds and the sky has become somewhat of a signature shot in many of his films.

Although not engaging as Elephant , it is certainly worth a look, as film that it certainly a bold step back on to the right path for the director.