Florida Films
River of Grass
DIRECTED BY KELLY REICHARDT
USA, 1994, 76 MIN
Sponsored by Governor's Office of Film & Entertainment and Film Florida
“A road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime” is how director Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) has described her inventive, slyly funny debut feature, informed by memories of growing up in Miami as the daughter of a detective father and a narcotics agent mother. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Cozy (Lisa Bowman) saunters into a bar and meets Lee (played by indie producer/director Larry Fessenden), a 29-year-old jobless momma’s boy of no particular ambition. Together, they embark on an impromptu bit of breaking and entering, during which a gun goes off, leading them to believe (mistakenly) that they’ve shot and killed a man. So they clumsily go on the lam, and River of Grass turns into a screwball film noir in which our haphazard Bonnie and Clyde find that being wanted felons isn’t nearly as sexy and exciting as it seems in the movies.
