The police pistol, which was the pivotal driver of the whole story, not only in a sense that it plays an intriguing role in deforming the heroine’s own destiny, but also it well encapsulates Kelly Reichardt’s attempts to subvert genre filmmaking her very directorial debut.Firstly in a jazz bar, Cozy’s father, the local crime scene detective, encountered a thief stealing from the cashier and tried to bust him. We can see him reaching for his holster, but only after a while are we informed that he had lost his pistol. Neither had the pistol been fired, nor had the delinquent been arrested. Later the firearm fell into the hands of Lee, a relieving ridance to his friend but for him a chance to glorify himself as a rebel. Just as we reckon the story would go down the road of crime movie cliché, River Of Grass charmingly takes sideways. Being kicked out from his grandma’s house where he has spent most of his life as a consequence of pointing the gun at her, the armed convenient shop robbery that came later is far from a smooth bad-ass move. Another burglar breaks in stealing Lee’s party, while he ended up having the groceries hastily grabbed and a broken nose. And there is certainly no way that he acted like a real super villain contempting the law when being pulled up by a highway trooper for having no toll. In none of these scenarios is the pistol ‘properly’ fired, as the men in this film were never potent to exert their power through acts of violence or professional conducts, or at the very least, being a decent father.In contrast, Kelly Reichardt stresses specifically the agency of a woman. From Cozy’s decision to hit the local pub all dressed-up as a way of breaking out of the secluded housewife lifestyle, to the phony murder sets the two self-proclaimed outlaws on a fugitive journey, our view drifts aimlessly around alongside with her fluid-like experience and emotions. Reichardt holds nothing back in keeping her camera in a close distance to Cozy’s body, conjuring an authentic portrait of a emotionally reppressed suburbanite. Their adventure never really leaves Dade county though, for her not even the dim motel room. There seems to be no catharsis to this ineffable sense of melancholia building up to her condition. Thereupon in this stagnation, a sudden gunshot at the end that took her ‘’Clyde’s’’ life was truly a shocker for us. The dramatization here has nothing to do with the action or the momentum per se as no close-up to it had been given, but rather with psychological issues. Ironically as the gun being disposed at the exact same place where it was founded, a flicker of romanticism lights up the bleak texture throughout the film, at least for a little while.Yet our heroine’s courageous voyage was quickly dampened in the heavy traffic, the aforementioned highway construction doesn’t symbolize free accessibility. We don’t get deterministic ending, instead the emotional shackle grips us firmly and the gunshot wasn’t powerful enough to break us free. Sadly enough nothing seems to have changed even the slightest.。

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