Night Moves movie review & film summary (1975)

It is probably true that if you saw "Night Moves" several times and took careful notes, you could reconstruct exactly what happens in the movie, but that might be missing the point. I saw it a week ago with an audience at that holy place of the cinema, George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and then I was joined in a discussion with Jim Healy, the assistant curator -- we talked for an hour with a room full of moviegoers and we were left with more questions than we started with.

Of course, we could fall back on the old filmcrit ploy, "we're not supposed to understand the plot." That worked for "Syriana." But in "Night Moves," I think it's a little trickier. 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. 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"?

Harry doesn't understand, that's for sure, and the last shot in the film, taken from high above, shows him in a boat that is circling aimlessly in the Gulf Stream, a splendid metaphor for Harry's investigation.

I was reminded of another Gene Hackman character named Harry. That would be Harry Caul, from Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" (1974). Caul is a high-tech investigator who bugs people and eavesdrops on conversations and is fanatic and paranoid and, like Moseby, not nearly as clever as he needs to be. Harry Caul has his workplace invaded by a competitor, he's fooled by a hidden microphone in a ball-point pen, he gets calls on his unlisted number, his landlord walks right past the security system in his apartment, and although he has a tape recording of a crucial conversation, he has no idea what it means.

Moseby is as helpless as Caul. He vaguely understands that most of the people he meets in his investigation are connected in one way or another -- even people who should not know each other. He figures out that they're up to more than selling antiques, making movies, or chartering boats and airplanes. He sees some of the romantic connections and gets himself involved in others. Delly, who has a disconcerting way of taking off her clothes, is perhaps interested in Harry -- but in seducing him, or just rattling his walnuts? Harry falls hard for Paula, and she seems attracted to him, too. They have one of those conversations where two people talk in the abstract about important things that are code for, "Do you want to sleep with me?" The screenplay by Alan Sharp is literate and elliptical all the way through:

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