A Perfect Day for Caribou

Jeff Rutherford’s A Perfect Day for Caribou is one of those films you either hate for its lack of narrative expansiveness or you love for the depth of its characterisation. There are mostly two characters over the film’s 95 minutes. And all of that time is invested in the characters: their dreams, their failures, their abject lives. They talk and talk and the more they talk the more you understand their plight. Unfortunately for them, they have waited several years too long to talk to each other. Festivals and streamers catering to adults with strong stomachs for some dryness on the way to enlightenment will find A Perfect Day for Caribou rewarding.

When the film starts, it is just Herman (Jeb Berrier), a half-bald, super-fluent man talking to a recorder. He is recording a suicide note but the excellence of his sentences betrays the hidden hand of a writer about as much as the film itself—the characters, the maleness, the frequent terseness—bears the mark of Hemingway. Herman is telling the intended recipient, his estranged son Nate, about his life. It’s supposed to be a sad note and it is, but it is also, weirdly, winning. Rutherford and his cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo have chosen to lens this scene and the entirety of the film in black and white, a choice that deepens the estrangement of the characters, only one of whom has been introduced at this point.

The second character gets in soon enough, ferried in by a ringing phone. On the other side is Nate (Charlie Plummer); he wants to come over. A Perfect Day for Caribou then becomes a two-hander featuring a father and son (played impeccably by Berrier and Plummer) going over their lives. As you might expect, a decent amount of time is consumed by a discussion of the woman connecting them. She’s never shown but as wife and mother to the men, she hovers. Sure, they believe this woman loved them once, but it also seems she was disappointed by them both. The men appear to have never recovered from that failure.

Herman has continued to disappoint the women in his life. He tells his companion about stealing his last partner’s truck, which is bad all on its own. But the kicker is her response to the theft: “She said I could keep it, if I promised to be gone forever.” For his part, Nate says he and his woman are “like small bad versions” of themselves. That devastation appears to have been passed over to Ralph, Nate’s son and the source of the third act’s central conflict.

And yet, there is enough detail attributed to the absent women to provoke sympathy and rescue them from a potential man-eater characterisation. One sits by the phone and calls a radio station every day, hoping to win something. The other talks to her son about teaching his father to dance.

Rutherford, a first time filmmaker, perfectly modulates his film, working a spare, sober miracle of score, silence, and speech. He has super-charged what has to be a very low-budget production with a significant investment in rather high-level writing. And along with his insights into masculinity and family, his major breakthrough here is a deft avoidance of treacly sentimentality. There is no real action here but action isn’t the point. Monologue is. Dialogue is. The damage parents and partners do is.