The premise of Van Sant's soon-to-be-released feature is simple: two nondescript guys drive into the desert, hastily pull over, set off on a hike, then proceed to get irretrievably lost. The two lost boys are played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, adding cachet for some, but the desert plays no favorites. Both named Gerry, they are indistinguishable except in their degree of carefree blundering and acquiescence to a dire fate. Like the trail from which the two Gerrys stray, Gerry, the film, has no truck with the well-traveled. Packing in references to Derek Jarman, Béla Tarr, and James Benning, Van Sant set out to make not so much anti-cinema as minimalist cinema, in which character is almost smothered by landscape. Panoramic expanses-parched flats, windswept dunes, and rock-strewn uplands-vie with the palpable heat in their indifferent splendor. What the collaborative combo of Van Sant, Damon, and Affleck was seeking in this arid trek wasn't a monologue of consequence, nor a profound gesture, but simply to become lost, as Van Sant says, to be “unlost...from modern American film.”