A Perfect Day for Caribou review – handsome ruminations on inherited misery

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.

The English poet Philip Larkin provides swift insight into A Perfect Day for Caribou, Jeff Rutherford’s debut feature about a father and son and the misery handed from one to the other, and the intergenerational failure that deepens and transforms as times goes on. Rutherford’s actual literary forebear is J.D. Salinger, and this is a knowingly American film: potential vistas, open landscapes and a central relationship defined by its original sin, a terse lineage passed on like a keepsake. Salinger’s 1949 short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, is the alluded source text, which similarly ruminates on the nature of memory and how past traumas inflect the pitch of the present.

The extended open begins with a middle-aged man, Herman (Jeb Berrier), balding but otherwise hirsute, sitting in his pick-up truck, recording a note for his estranged son, Nate (Charlie Plummer). It is a pained soliloquy: a set of halting laments and self-justifications. He plans to kill himself. Berrier is a strong and thoughtful performer, and his solo scenes constitute the film’s most affecting sequences. By revelation or serendipity, Nate suddenly calls to reconnect, setting in motion a subsequent two-hander of “remember when,” held across a sprawling backdrop of Oregon hills, peaks and plains (the exact location is not directly named, and both Herman and Nate only vaguely suggest that they are from “around” the place).

The dialogue between the pair is studied in its inarticulacy, which insinuates a form of authentic portrayal but is in fact novelistic: Rutherford’s screenplay is pockmarked with call-back images (cigarettes) and thematic motifs (alcoholism). One character’s apparent loathing of Christmas acutely indicates the film’s explicit reckoning with signs and symbols. The overt literariness hinders some of the visual pleasures on show. Handsomely shot in black and white by Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, the screen appears in a deliberately cramped 4:3 ratio, shading with irony the wide expanses of terrain and jagged rises. The concentrated, tasteful framing of situations, objects and characters is a bit distracting: the cleanly bisected cemetery where Nate first arrives in his car; the careful display of household goods tied to the back of Herman’s truck.

Nate has brought along his own son, Ralph (Oellis Levine), whose mostly elusive presence drives forward the basic lines of the plot, all the while reconfiguring the anxieties that have held these men apart. Plummer has a difficult role as the young father struggling to reconcile with his wounded patriarch. There is something strained about Plummer’s tilted head, his self-conscious mumbling and the inevitable moment of his climactic anger. This sad, lonely outsider is a classic figure that illustrates the film’s wider derivativeness. To derive is no bad thing, but the inspired moments in this work are purely imaginative. One abrupt shot of a family unit – Nate, Herman, and a woman (Dana Millican) whom they briefly encounter – offers a striking alternative reality of lives redeemed, or not yet destroyed.

A Perfect Day for Caribou was screened as part of the Locarno Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.