Kelly Reichardt, River of Grass

So, okay, I watched this movie, River of Grass, on Fandor. It was pretty good. Kelly Reichardt's first movie set outside her hometown of Miami.

A young mother leaves her baby home alone and starts hanging around with a scumbag she met in a bar. After an unfortunate handgun incident, they wisely decide to flee Florida but don't have the money to do so. Meanwhile, her jazz drummer police detective father searches for the service revolver he somehow lost.

Sort of an arthouse version of Aloha, Bobby & Rose.

Considering the storyline, the movie made Florida look pretty good. The little motels they drove past looked nice. A cops speaks to them after they try to run a toll booth and is surprisingly polite under the circumstances.

Jon Jost blogged some time back that people told him that Kelly Reichardt's movies were sort of like his, so he watched her movies but couldn't see the similarity. I didn't either, at least not in this case. There was another movie of hers, Wendy and Lucy, that might have been more Jon Jost-like. Both that and River and Grass were about people who wanted to leave the state but didn't have the means to do so. That was also true of her western, Meek's Cutoff which took place on the Oregon Trail.