River of Grass has a structure like a scrapbook. Still images fill the frame at first, like photographs glued onto the screen (that’s dimestore Godard.) And voiceover by a Dade County housewife named Cozy (Lisa Bowman) provides the caption for each snap (in a Malick-derived monotone.) She describes her birth over a crudely animated rendering of a medical building (“I was born in 1962 at Coral Gables Hospital.”) She describes her moniker over a school photo shot during her elementary years (“I was given the name after my father’s favorite jazz drummer.”) And she describes her family over scratchy images of teenaged makeouts and lined notebook paper (“Though Bobby and I had never touched, he wrote me poems all through high school. Later I accepted his proposal for marriage. I knew Bobby loved me, and I figured someday I’d love him too.”) The film that follows—which was directed by Kelly Reichardt and first released in 1995—depicts the runaway that inevitably happens once Cozy realizes that she’ll never love Bobby back. Even after the stills have given way to more traditional scenes, she continues to speak over the movie, always in a tone as flat as swampland. There’s a pointed Badlandsness to her diction; Cozy talks as though she were reading aloud from paperback romance novels. Or maybe it sounds more like she’s describing events to a jury—maybe the scraps are meant to be evidence.

Cozy’s southern stream of consciousness introduces us to a series of men, most of whom try to corral her into their own chosen location. There’s Bobby, whom she already wants to get away from; and her daddy Ryder (Dick Russell), a full-time detective and part-time drummer; followed by Lee Ray Harold (Larry Fessenden), who whisks her into that runaway while brandishing a drink and a gun. Next up is Mr. Hamilton, though the new pair meet him accidentally—they sneak into his pool, then shoot him (maybe?) when he sights them. Finally there’s Ryder’s investigator friends, more males all, who gang up to find their small-town Bonnie and Clyde. Lee Ray’s comically blase about that whole chase scenario. He’s a consummate drinker, and Fessenden plays him as though he’s got molasses in his bone marrow. The actor barely even walks across the sets—it’d more accurately be described as a slump. He’s passive in both the psychological and physical sense, with the joke being that it makes him the ideal man for Cozy.

She, to wit, proves dedicated to her own sort of observational passivity, more interested in contemplating actions than in doing them. According to Reichardt, all this character work forms a sort of skewed autobiography—not the gun part and not the run part, but the detective dad and the Dade upbringing, for starters. You sense that anyway, in the way that the film keeps skidding away from its “plot” and toward its beloved longueurs: a couple removing palmetto bugs from a motel wall; a driver trying to light a sad little joint roach with an empty lighter; a mother smoking a cigarette and passing her baby Coca-Cola in a bottle. The audio track uses Ryder’s drums to keep propelling us from one sense memory to the next, just as the runaway’s car proves an externalization of the narrative: it’s merely a motor powering itself towards nothing. Hurricane Andrew tore through all this land back in ‘92, but from the looks of things it might as well have happened the week of production.

A restored digital print of River of Grass will be playing at the Brattle Theatre this week, in a three-day run that just-so-happens to unofficially cross over with two other Brattle happenings. The first is Fessenden himself: he’ll be presenting a film of his own, Wendigo (originally released in 2001,) during next week’s Boston Underground Film Festival (3.24, 9:45pm). The second is the Brattle’s ongoing “History of Noir” program: With River of Grass, Reichardt takes that form and skids away from it, creating a work that subverts the genre—its archetypal road trips, its soulful detectives, its class-based pessimism, its femme fatales—by injecting it with the banality of a reality wrecked by disasters, natural and otherwise. (A New York Times review from the film’s initial release called it “a pointed antidote to the hyperbolic romance of violence evoked by such movies as Natural Born Killers and True Romance”; Reichardt herself often refers to it as “a crime movie without the crime.”) In its own burnt-out way, River of Grass—which remains highly emblematic of early ’90s independent cinema, in both its overanxious form and its discursive spirit—reclaims the mode from the past-generation filmmakers who had already rewritten it in their own male image. This is noir twice removed.

Reichardt has rewritten that form in a woman’s image: the tragedy of noirs past was often that a duplicitous woman would exhibit a sense of agency; the tragedy in River of Grass is that Cozy doesn’t have any agency to exhibit. Hell, she barely even has bullets. If there had ever been a sense of hope in this place off the side of the Everglades—economic, romantic, or otherwise—then it got swept away alongside the rest of the hurricane’s debris. All that’s left are those textural memories. So Reichardt sands the noir down to a blank page, then fills it in with the contents of a diary. She emphasizes a life’s memories, documenting the folk tales (a furious wife depositing her hacked-up husband behind a shower wall,) the clothes (faded t-shirts and acid-wash jeans,) and the culture (“within two years, there will be a shopping center every fifteen miles.”) Like a real scrapbook, her debut film is an heirloom.

RIVER OF GRASS. BRATTLE THEATRE. 40 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. FRIDAY 3.18—SUNDAY 3.20. $9-11.

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JAKE MULLIGAN

Jake Mulligan is the film section editor at DigBoston.

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