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Even if his NYU film professor didn’t, Jeff Rutherford knew what Oregon could offer as a cinematic backdrop. Rutherford, a former Portlander, remembers polite skepticism when that professor reviewed a draft of the screenplay for his first short film: “Jeff, you have this thing where it says farmland in one sentence and then beach in the next…”
Nehalem Bay provided that short, 2019′s Rainbow Pie, with exactly that topographical quick change. So when it came time to make a debut feature, Rutherford wanted a setting that could similarly be relied on—not only for aura, but to help break cinematic convention with long takes and landscape interaction.
A Perfect Day for Caribou, shot in black-and-white during 2021 in Central Oregon’s Gilliam County, is a stark dialogue between estranged father Herman (Jeb Berrier) and son Nate (Charlie Plummer). After an impromptu reunion, they wander across grasslands and forests, sharing their current relationship struggles and discordant memories from before Herman abruptly exited Nate’s life.
Jon Raymond, a writer on Old Joy and five other Kelly Reichardt films, knows more than most about employing Oregon wilderness as a character. He’ll moderate a post-screening Q&A with Rutherford at Cinema 21 on Aug. 15, as A Perfect Day for Caribou comes back to Oregon and the hometown of cast members like Berrier, Wrick Jones and Dana Millican.
The film’s two leads have experience traipsing around the state. Charlie Plummer, who plays the soft-spoken, 20-something Nate, notably starred in the acclaimed horse-and-his-boy drama Lean on Pete (2017), directed by Andrew Haigh and shot in Portland and Burns. And in the aforementioned Rainbow Pie, Jeb Berrier hauled a red suitcase through Nehalem Bay, just as Herman clings to a mysterious, taped-up box from his ex-wife in Caribou.
Plummer and Berrier both have theater backgrounds (Berrier acted in Playboy of the Western World and 1984 at Artists Repertory Theatre). In Caribou, Rutherford sought to capitalize on those skills, shooting fastidiously blocked, seldom-cut scenes and letting the performers cook.
“When actors have seen this movie, they get really excited,” Rutherford says, “because they’re like, ‘Oh, I would want to be in something where you have time and space to do your thing.’”
You can see why. Sure, it’s a risk for the crew to pull off a five-minute scene where actors amble around each other, but Plummer and Berrier get to build their characters with pure body language and a massive canvas. Watching the duo search high and low for a missing something (not to be spoiled here) amounts to a kind of parallel play between Herman and Nate, à la toddlers lost in activity next to each other, never sure if a bond is actually forming.
When the depressed father and well-intentioned son first meet at a Condon, Ore., cemetery and attempt to converse face to face, Rutherford embraces all the protracted, hushed awkwardness of estrangement small talk.
“There’s a way to achieve that with a bunch of cuts and like going back over the shoulder and stuff, but there’s also a way to achieve it just by actually taking four minutes of real time,” he says. “I just personally like [that approach] more.”
Later, when the men venture into nature, it’s a genuine trek (more than a few actual stumbles made it into the movie). There’s even a shot where Herman and Nate hop the cemetery fence and run onto a prairie while the camera slowly zooms after their shrinking bodies for nearly 60 seconds.
“I kept referring to that as the Alice in Wonderland shot,” Rutherford says. “I liked the absurdity and weirdness that they’re moving through different worlds.”
Caribou may be a low-budget indie shot (in part) on a ranch owned by one of Rutherford’s friends. But the film’s technical ambition, enhanced by cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo (A Love Song), testifies to why it has played festivals from Locarno to Slamdance (Rutherford predicts a distribution deal is “really close”).
Maybe the state film commission should advertise: “Film in Oregon—where shifting topography is a special effect.”
SEE IT: A Perfect Day for Caribou, not rated, plays at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, 503-223-4515, cinema21.com. 7:15 pm Tuesday, Aug. 15. $12.