Critics reviews

For me, Gerry is the movie that Van Sant was born to make: a deceptively minimalist comedy based loosely on a true story, with an aesthetic inspired by the severe, long-take style of the Hungarian master director Béla Tarr (whose influence the director readily admitted).

Just like the disoriented characters, we get lost in the magnificent landscapes and endless deserts of Death Valley. Gerry was like nothing Van Sant had done before, a welcome provocation in line with the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr.

[An] exotic experimental folly... Best to see it as bone-headed expression of Van Sant's own state of mind: a sententious howl of aesthetic anguish.

Some of Van Sant’s early films reveal an artist finding his voice; Gerry gave its aesthetically restless director the chance to try on some eye-catching formalist clothing. Its enduring value, then, is that it motivates the viewer to seek out the source of its hand-me-downs.

It was a misjudgement to use time-lapse images of speeding clouds rolling in like smoke off Dr Jekyll's nightcap, when the picture already achieves disorientation by more furtive means. One of Van Sant's most effective methods is to allow the scenery to loom on screen long enough for its magnificence to be slightly depleted a mottled mountainside, bunched into folds and creases, comes to resemble a leopard-skin coat dumped on a bedroom floor.

Intriguing, ferociously austere, but subtly and unlocatably humorous... [Gerry] is not precisely a return to Van Sant's widely publicised indie roots, but actually a vivid progression, a bold excursion into a European cinematic sensibility, which Van Sant cooks up with some Americana of his own devising.

The film functions like a meditative mood enhancer: the sounds, and the repetition, and the directionless trajectory all combine to allow the viewer the space for personal journeys.

The movie is so gloriously bloody-minded, so perverse in its obstinacy, that it rises to a kind of mad purity. The longer the movie ran, the less I liked it and the more I admired it.

Gus Van Sant says this 2001 feature was inspired by Bela Tarr, James Benning, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jacques Tati, and Chantal Akerman, among others, but it’s far below the level of any of these filmmakers at their best. Within the commercial context suggested by the film’s only actors, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon, it’s certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and it’s less phony and offensive than Finding Forrester.

A tough, vigorous exercise in cinematic form and pure aesthetics... If nothing else, “Gerry” marks a genuine attempt by Van Sant to reclaim a personal voice that had gone mute, to rediscover, as it were, his own private Idaho.

''Gerry'' is such a radical about-face from [Van Sant's] flagrantly commercial movies like ''Finding Forrester'' and ''Good Will Hunting'' that it feels like a self-mortifying act of contrition... With all its quirks, ''Gerry'' seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.

...Gerry reveals itself as a ravishing mix of mystic fairy tale, modern-day alienation, and gay allegory. Affleck's Gerry puts great trust in the other Gerry's ability to save him from a physical quandary and to later elevate him to a spiritual one... Not since his first film, Mala Noche, has Van Sant produced a film so pure, uncompromising, and ravishing to watch.