
River of Grass. 1994. USA. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt. With Lisa Bowman, Larry Fessenden, Dick Russell. DCP. 76 min.
For the past 30 years, Glass Eye Pix has been a remarkably successful incubator of young talent, and Larry Fessenden himself a nurturing and fiercely protective den mother to then-unknown filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, the writer-director who would go on to make Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy (also produced by Fessenden), Meek’s Cutoff, and First Cow. Reichardt astonished critics with this quasi-road movie, a melancholy noir set along the lost highways of South Florida that recalls Wim Wenders’s lonely visions of America—even as it deconstructs that peculiarly American theme of lovers on the lam, as seen in such films as You Only Live Once, Gun Crazy, and My Own Private Idaho. Courtesy Oscilloscope Pictures