Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Okay, before we
jump in, just take a second. When you hear American
cinema, what pops into your head? Is it, like,
explosions, fast cuts, big heroes saving the
day? Yeah, that's sort of the default, isn't
it? The Hollywood machine. Speed, spectacle,
everything wrapped up neatly. But today, we're
diving deep into Kelly Reichardt. And she's...
Well, she's pretty much the exact opposite of
all that. Totally. A powerful counterpoint. Yeah.
So our mission today is to really get under the
skin of her work. We're looking at her whole
career, her life, her very distinct style, trying
to understand why so many people see her as one
of the most important American filmmakers working
today, even though she actively avoids, you know,
the whole commercial game. Or maybe because she
avoids it. And yeah, let's nail down who she
is right away. She's known for these incredibly
minimalist films. People connect her to slow
cinema and her focus. Almost always on working
class folks, people on the fringes, often in
these small rural settings. She's telling stories
that you just don't see coming out of the big
studios. It's a whole different slice of America.
Exactly. Documenting the margins. OK, so let's
build this up from the beginning. Part one, the
foundation. How did this unique vision develop?
She was born back in 1964, grew up in Miami.
And the detail about her parents always jumps
out at me. They were both in law enforcement.
Right. Police officers. Who split up when she
was young? It's just an interesting contrast,
isn't it? Growing up surrounded by, you know,
rules, authority, structure, and then spending
her career exploring lives lived right on the
edge or totally outside of those structures.
That's a great point. And maybe that early grounding
in photography is key, too. That was her first
passion, not film. Ah, okay. So that patient
eye composing a single shot. Exactly. You can
feel it in her movies. They feel like these carefully
composed still images that are just... allowed
to breathe the landscape, the small actions,
washing dishes, walking. It all gets space. And
she formalized that with an MFA, right? From
the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Yep. But just as important, maybe even more so
for her artistic freedom, is her academic side.
She's been teaching for a long time. Right, the
position at Bard College. Since 2006. S. William
Senfeld, artist in residence. Precisely. And
having that steady base, that academic role,
it gives her incredible freedom. She doesn't
need her films to make millions. She's not constantly
chasing studio funding, which means she doesn't
have to compromise. No pressure to speed things
up or add explosions. Which brings us to her
debut, River of Grass, in 1994. Because that
was... Well, it was critically acclaimed, right?
But then things went quiet for a long time. Oh,
yeah. Critically, River of Grass was a huge success
straight out of the gate. Nominated for three
Independent Spirit Awards, the Grand Jury Prize
at Sundance. Big deal publications loved it.
Boston Globe, Film Comment, Village Voice called
it one of the best of the year. By all normal
industry logic, her career should have just taken
off like a rocket. But it didn't. And this is
fascinating. She talks about this lost decade.
Ten years. From the mid -90s onward, she just
couldn't get another feature funded. Ten years.
After that kind of debut praise, it wasn't like
she took a break. The industry basically shut
her out. And she's been pretty direct about why
she thinks that happened. Heartbreakingly direct.
She said point blank that she felt being a woman
trying to raise money for these kinds of quiet,
character -driven films was a major barrier.
The money people just didn't see the commercial
potential, especially with a woman at the helm
of that kind of project. Wow. So after all that
initial success, 10 years of doors slamming shut,
what did she do? Just give up? Not a chance.
This is where you really see her independence
kicking in. She basically adopted this attitude
of, you know, fine, if you won't fund my features,
I'll just make Super 8 shorts, like a fuck you
to the system, as she put it. Ah, love that.
So she kept working, just on a much smaller scale.
Exactly. She made shorts like Ode in 99, then
a year in 2001. It wasn't just about staying
busy. It was about honing her style under extreme
limitations, learning to do more with less. And
one of those shorts, Travis, from 2004, seemed
significant. It tackled the Iraq war. Yeah, quite
directly for her. It was maybe the first really
clear sign that her minimalist approach could
carry serious political weight. So even in that
so -called lost decade, she was developing her
voice. Absolutely. Critics picked up on it, too,
saying Travis and Sus. Then a year showed her
unease with the Bush administration, the war.
It wasn't lost time at all. It was incubation.
She was doubling down on low -budget realism,
embedding critique within character. So when
she did get back to features, her vision was
rock solid, unshapeable. And the turning point,
the thing that finally broke that decade -long
drought? Yeah. It came about almost randomly.
It involved Todd Haynes. Yeah, her close friend,
the director Todd Haynes, she drove him from
the Seattle Film Festival down to Portland. And
that trip was pivotal. Because that's where she
met writer John Raymond and producer Neil Kopp.
Exactly. And Raymond especially became this huge
influence. He's the reason so many of her iconic
films are set in the Pacific Northwest. He gave
her these incredibly specific human stories rooted
in that region. Stories that just fit perfectly
with what she wanted to do. OK, so that connection
really kickstarts everything again, which leads
us nicely into part two. The Ascent, the period
from 2006 onwards really defined by Oregon, Montana,
and John Raymond. And that partnership bore fruit
almost immediately with Old Joy in 2006, based
on one of Raymond's short stories from his collection,
Livability. And the plot is pure Reichardt, isn't
it? Yeah. Two buddies, maybe drifted apart a
bit. One feels kind of hemmed in by family life.
They go camping. That's it. Pretty much. A weekend
trip to the Cascades, Bagby Hot Springs near
Portland. All the drama is internal, unspoken,
quiet tension. But it wasn't quiet critically.
It put her right back on the map internationally.
Big time. Old Joy won the Tiger Award at the
Rotterdam Film Festival, which was huge. It was
the first American film ever to win that award.
Suddenly, this small, quiet film about two guys
in the woods was getting major arthouse attention
worldwide. The momentum was back. Yeah. And she
built on it straight away. Wendy and Lucy in
2008, also adapted from a Raymond story in Livability.
Yeah. And Wendy and Lucy really amps up those
themes of loneliness, financial insecurity. It's
just gut wrenching. This woman, Wendy, her car
breaks down. She loses her dog, Lucy, her only
companion. She has basically nothing. It's about
desperation on the margins. And that film really
brought Michelle Williams into the spotlight
too, right? There was serious Oscar buzz for
her performance. Definitely. And that kicked
off this amazing collaboration between Reichardt
and Williams. Reichardt talks about how much
she values Williams' confidence, her curiosity.
She sees her as a real partner in exploring the
material. That partnership is so central to her
work now. But Riker didn't just stick to one
kind of story after that. She started playing
with genre, still often with Williams. Absolutely.
In 2010, she makes Meek's Cutoff, a Western.
Which sounds unlikely. A minimalist, slow cinema
Western. The genre is usually about epic landscapes,
gunfights, clear heroes and villains. Right,
but she flips it completely. Meek's cutoff is
about getting lost. It's 1845, pioneers on the
Oregon Trail, completely stranded. It's claustrophobic,
tense, almost silent sometimes, no score, just
the wind, the creaking wagons, the fear. So the
focus is on the mundane struggle of survival,
stitching clothes, finding water, the anxiety.
Exactly, the existential dread, not the heroic
action. It's anti -spectacle. And again, critics
recognized its power. It competed for the golden
lion at Venice. And she kept pushing. Next up
was Night Moves in 2013. A thriller. A thriller,
yeah. Also written with Raymond. About environmental
activists planning to blow up a dam. So a definite
shift in tone. More overt tension. a faster pulse
than some of her earlier work. And Night Moves
was different technically too, wasn't it? Huge
difference. It was the first time she shot digitally.
She'd always preferred film, 16mm, 35mm for that
texture, that grain. That is a big shift for
someone so committed to a certain aesthetic.
Why digital for that one? Well, the thinking
seems to be it fit the story. Lots of secrecy,
nighttime scenes. Digital often handles low light
better, capturing people moving in the shadows.
So it was a practical choice to serve the thriller
aspect, even while she maintained that careful
framing and pacing, adapting the tools, but not
the core vision. And through all this, the recognition
kept coming. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, USA
Fellowship in 2011. She was really cementing
her place. And we should mention, she often edits
her own films, too. Which is crucial. If slow
cinema is about pacing, then editing is pacing.
By cutting her own films, she maintains absolute
control over that rhythm. No one else can come
in and say, let's speed this up a bit for the
audience. The pauses, the long takes, they stay
exactly as she intends them. Makes sense. Then
came Certain Women in 2016. Based on stories
by Mail Molloy this time and a shift in location,
too. Yep. Moved east to Montana for this one
and assembled this incredible cast. Williams
again, Laura Dern, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart.
It's structured differently, too. Three interconnected
stories about women's lives in this vast landscape.
And that one also did really well. Critically,
internationally. Won Best Film at the London
Film Festival. So yeah, by 2016, she'd spent
a solid decade proving that her quiet, detailed,
uncompromising approach could consistently deliver
powerful cinema that resonated globally. She
was firmly established as this master of depicting
the interior American experience. Okay, that
string of successes is the perfect lead -in to
part three. Let's really dig into the style itself.
Minimalism, realism, and what might be her defining
trait? Ambiguity. Right. This is about her cinematic
language. People always say minimalist, realist.
But the critic A .O. Scott came up with a really
useful term, neo -neo -realism. Neo -neo -realism.
OK, unpack that. What's the connection to classic
Italian new realism? Films like Rome Open City.
So Italian neorealism came right after World
War II. It was about showing the struggles of
ordinary people in devastated cities, using real
locations, often non -actors, focusing on economic
hardship, moral gray areas, rejecting Hollywood
glamour. Reichert takes that same spirit, that
commitment to showing hardship without making
it pretty. And applies it to contemporary America.
Exactly. But instead of post -war rubble, she's
looking at the wreckage of, say, the industrial
economy, precarious work, run -down towns, the
struggle to get by on the margins. and existential
fragility, filmed with that same kind of unvarnished
realism. The landscapes shift from Rome to rural
Oregon or Montana, but the core impulse is similar.
And that aesthetic fits hand in glove with this
idea of slow cinema. Perfectly. Matthew Flanagan's
concept of slow cinema really describes her work.
Long takes, very minimal dialogue, minimalist
action. The drama isn't in big events. It's in
the waiting, the looking, the quiet moments.
It definitely asks something different from the
audience, doesn't it? You can't just sit back
and let the plot wash over you. No, you have
to engage. You have to watch closely. The slow
pace gives you time to think, to observe, to
feel the weight of the moment. Reichert herself
talks about mainstream movie previews feeling
like an assault, all the fast cuts and noise.
Her films are intentionally the opposite, an
antidote. She calls them just glimpses of people
passing through, not the whole story. Right.
She refuses to impose these neat beginnings,
middles, and especially ends, which leads directly
to that core idea, ambiguity, the rejection of
easy answers. Her films famously do not so much
resolve as dissolve. Why is that so important
to her? Well, she said she's suspicious of absolutes.
The traditional Hollywood the end where everything
is tied up in a bow. She finds that absurd for
the kind of short glimpses she offers. It's not
realistic. We only see these characters for a
brief time. How could we possibly know their
ultimate fate? Providing that kind of closure
feels false to her. So the ambiguity is a form
of realism in itself. Precisely. And it puts
the weight back on us, the viewers. Like that
critic said, we're forced to write their third
acts in our heads. We have to sit with the uncertainty.
Think about those characters left hanging. Kurt,
in old joy, just wandering the streets. Does
he figure things out? We don't know. Wendy and
Lucy, still searching for her dog, still broke,
still heading for Alaska. What happens to her?
Or the pioneers in Meek's Cutoff. Lost. Depending
on a guide they can't trust. Caught between potential
salvation and total disaster, we never find out
which. That lack of resolution forces you, the
viewer, to actively participate, to think critically
about the situations, the systems, the lack of
safety nets. It reflects the reality that for
many people, especially on the margins, life
doesn't have neat endings. And that ties straight
into the themes we need to unpack in part four.
Marginality, politics, and her nuanced approach
to feminism. The character she chooses. They're
always vulnerable. Consistently, her focus is
on people who don't have a net. One wrong step,
one bit of bad luck, and their whole world could
just fall apart. She's not making films about
people climbing the ladder of the American dream.
She's making films about the people the ladder
seems to have forgotten. Or maybe it was never
even there for them. Exactly. That's why IndieWire
called her one of the country's best chroniclers
of the American experience, because she shows
the parts the commercial industry ignores. The
precarious jobs, the rural poverty, the housing
insecurity. And these characters often seem caught
in this bind, right? Between the myth of America
opportunity, the frontier, and their own limited
reality. Yeah, trapped between a mythology of
greatness and the personal limitations that govern
their drab realities. They're reaching for something
better, but they're tethered to the economic
edge. And she uses these individual stories to
make larger political points, often allegorically.
Meek's cutoff is maybe the clearest example.
It really is. And here we need to be clear. We're
reporting what Reichardt herself has stated.
She explicitly confirmed that the character of
Stephen Meek, the boastful, incompetent guide,
was intended to echo President George W. Bush.
OK, so the parallel she was drawing. She described
it as a story about a bragger leading a bunch
of people into the desert without a plan, becoming
totally reliant on local people he doesn't understand
and actively mistrusts. For her, this directly
mirrored the situation with the Iraq war, a confident.
leader taking the country into unknown territory
dependent on local dynamics full of suspicion
it's a historical allegory with a very sharp
contemporary edge that's powerful and the political
undercurrents are there in other films too even
if more subtly like wendy and lucy Absolutely.
Coming out right before the 2008 crash, it tapped
into deep economic anxiety. And some read Wendy's
specific vulnerability as reflecting how women
were perhaps bearing the brunt of the economic
fallout from the war years, slipping through
the cracks faster. And then Night Moves isn't
allegory at all, is it? It's overtly political.
Right. The protagonists are political actors,
radical environmentalists. And setting it in
Oregon is deliberate. The state has this long,
intense history of environmental conflict. conflict,
timber wars, the spotted owl controversy. She's
grounding the radicalism in a real place with
real history. So how do these political themes
and focus on marginalized characters connect
with feminist ideas, especially since she apparently
pushes back against the label feminist filmmaker?
Yeah, she seems wary of labels, maybe feeling
they're too prescriptive. But her work is undeniably
packed with feminist ideas, both in content and
form. Content wise, it's pretty obvious. Most
of her films center on female characters. Yeah.
Or like in certain women, the structure ensures
female perspectives dominate. but it goes deeper
than just putting women on screen it's how she
does it how she plays with genre for instance
look at old joy a film about two men but she
explores their friendship through vulnerability
sensitivity qualities mainstream hollywood often
codes as feminine and avoids in male characters
subverting expectations of masculinity exactly
and night moves with its focus on environmental
protection and strong female activists aligns
with eco -feminist thinking valuing the earth
challenging, destructive industrial forces. And
just her whole way of working small budgets,
location shooting, realism, you could argue that's
a feminist act in itself, right? Rejecting the
male -dominated commercial system. Completely.
It's a resistance through practice. And her camera
work reinforces that. She absolutely refuses
to objectify her characters, male or female.
The framing is careful, respectful. There's none
of that typical cinematic gaze. And she does
that thing. Yeah. Lingering on details after
the characters leave the shot. Yes. That's so
key. She'll hold on a landscape, a room, a discarded
object. It forces you to think about the context,
the environment, the labor involved, the residue
of their presence, rather than just focusing
on the character's emotional state or physical
appearance. It challenges what we expect to see,
what we value in the frame. It slows you down
again, makes you consider the whole picture.
And even using segmented narratives, like in
River of Grass or Certain Women, breaks from
that traditional, linear, often male -driven
plot structure. It allows for multiple viewpoints,
a more fragmented, perhaps more truthful reflection
of reality. Her style is her politics in many
ways. Okay, so this unwavering vision, this unique
style, it hasn't faded. Which brings us to part
five, recent acclaim in what she's been doing
lately. No, if anything, the critical momentum
has just kept building. After Serving Women in
Montana, she came back to Oregon for First Cow
in 2019, another John Raymond adaptation, this
time from his novel The Half -Life. And First
Cow. That was huge critically, wasn't it? Phenomenal.
Just about unanimous praise. Critics put it up
there with River of Grass as peak Reichardt.
It's this beautiful, quiet story about friendship,
survival, and the very beginnings of capitalism
on the American frontier centered around stealing
milk from the first cow in the territory. Classic
Reichardt themes. Small scale, big implications.
Totally. But the release. Oh, the timing was
just brutal. It came out in March 2020. Right
when everything shut down. Exactly. A24 was distributing,
but the pandemic hit almost immediately. The
theatrical run was basically canceled, forced
onto VOD very quickly. So massive critical acclaim.
But its chance in the marketplace was just wiped
out by circumstance. Kind of a perfect, if tragic,
metaphor for her character's lives, really. Wow.
But she kept working through that period. She
did. Her next film, Showing Up, came out in 2022.
Back in Portland, Michelle Williams playing a
sculptor preparing for a show. And this one hit
a major milestone for her. Which was? It was
selected for the main competition at the Cannes
Film Festival. Her first time competing for the
Palme d 'Or. That's huge. The absolute peak of
international film prestige. For a director who
makes such deliberately small uncommercial films.
It's an incredible validation, proof that artistic
integrity, that singular vision, can eventually
reach the very highest levels of recognition,
completely independent of box office. And she
didn't stop there. Her latest, The Mastermind,
premiered just this year, 2025, also in competition
at Cannes. That's right. Starring Josh O 'Connor.
So back to back Palme d 'Or nominations. Her
critical standing just keeps rising. It's undeniable
now. Every film gets good reviews and ones like
River of Grass and First Cow are seen as pretty
much masterpieces. But we always have to circle
back to that commercial reality. All this critical
love. Yeah. It doesn't translate to big box office
numbers. Never has. Certain Women is still her
highest grossing film, and it barely cleared
a million dollars, which just highlights, again,
her absolute dedication to her own path. She
makes the films she needs to make the way she
needs to make them, and the traditional market
success is just not the goal. It can't be. So
wrapping this up. Our deep dive really shows
how Kelly Reichardt has carved out this unique,
vital space in American film. It's through that
commitment to slow cinema, that unflinching look
at the working class bludgeons, and a style that's
both politically aware and formally inventive.
She really is the quiet chronicler of a side
of America we rarely see on screen. Yeah. And
as we finish, think about that recurring element.
The lack of closure, how she deliberately leaves
you hanging, thinking about these characters,
wondering about their futures, long after the
film ends. So here's a final thought to chew
on. By denying us that easy, satisfying ending
that Hollywood usually provides that comforting
lie, maybe is Reichardt doing something more
profound? Is she training us, perhaps, to be
more patient, more observant, more critically
engaged with the complexities of real life, where
struggles rarely just... And neatly. What does
that patience for cinema demands ask of you?
And what reward might you find in that patience
in terms of understanding the American experience,
especially for those living without that safety
net? Something to consider. Definitely something
to consider. Thanks for diving deep with us today.
We'll catch you on the next one.