Is it also meant to have something to say about America’s post-Watergate malaise? Hollywood? On the one hand I don’t find it very compelling, whether because of the gaps in the plot or just the overall sense that it’s unclear what it’s about beyond the story of Harry Moseby’s unhappy life. This is a movie I have mixed feelings about. I love Tom picking up the conch shell and using it as brass knuckles. There are some really rough patches in this film that I couldn’t see much of a point to. I’m not sure she always gets away with it. One of her hallmarks was an attitude toward continuity that seems at times like perversity. Dede Allen was a celebrated film editor and a frequent collaborator with Penn. And not only is she naked, she’s available. I’m not sure how old Melanie Griffith was in this, her credited debut. He would have been in his mid-20s when it was shot but looks about ten years older and is already displaying his manic tendencies. James Wood is here in one of his first films. A couple of newbies in the cast demand attention. He just stumbles upon her infidelity because he happens to be driving by the cinema she’s coming out of. For how long has Ellen’s cheating been going on? Months? Years? And note that he isn’t even suspicious when he finds out. Of course there’s plenty of irony in Harry being a specialist in investigating adulterous affairs and not even being aware that his own marriage is blowing up. She’s as surprised to find out about what happened when he tracked down his father as he is to see Ziegler at the end. He doesn’t tell her anything important about himself. This is why he only plays chess with himself, going over games that have already been played (or solved). The reason Harry is so limited in his point of view is that he’s a loner. He just doesn’t have enough information to really solve the case, which seems to involve a lot more than he thought it did. Harry has a limited point of view that we never get outside. There’s a reason that boat is named the “Point of View” and it’s stuck at the end going around in circles. My guess is that it’s meant to underline Harry’s own confusion. They’re left unanswered and unanswerable on purpose or for a reason. I don’t see where there’s any answer to these questions, or even much to be gained from speculating on them. For example: what was Delly going to say on the voice message she left for Harry? Does Harry even go back to listen to it? Was Delly murdered? If so, was the intention to kill Ziegler as well? Why? Was there any significance to the fact that Ellen works in antiques and that’s what the bad guys are smuggling? Was there a connection between Delly and what was going on? As Vincent Canby asked, “Why does Mummy seek the return of the child, who she clearly detests?” Was Harry being set up, or was his involvement just an accident from the beginning? Why would they set him up? How would that work? It seems to me they would have done better to leave him out of it. That they didn’t, and wanted to end on such a note, says something. If Arthur Penn, or screenwriter Alan Sharp, had wanted to have Ziegler explain something … anything … they could have. Something is always turning up to force him to revise everything he thought he knew, and then at the end of the film he has to revise everything again, and there is a shot where one of the characters, while drowning, seems to be desperately shaking his head as if to say - what? ‘I didn’t mean to do this’? ‘I didn’t know who was in the boat’? ‘In the water’? ‘You don’t understand’?” Here’s Roger Ebert, who rated Night Moves one of his Great Movies: “The plot can be understood, but not easily, and not on first viewing, and besides, the point is that Moseby is as lost as we are. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the death of Ziegler. It seems to me that the plot’s many unresolved mysteries are left intentionally vague. In the case of Night Moves I think there’s more at work than just the usual casual indifference to wrapping everything up neatly at the end. It is typical of such stories that they involve complications they’re not very concerned about explaining. Night Moves is often characterized as a modern noir, with a plot about a decadent moneyed family’s seedy past that seems torn from the pages of a Ross Macdonald novel.
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