Robin Wright Can’t Quite Land Her Directorial Debut
Robin Wright’s directorial debut may be named Land, but it certainly doesn’t tread any new ground. The film is a tactical retreat into the wilderness, where an appreciation for life and community can once again be found—after a personal tragedy—in the hardships of self-sufficiency. At least, that’s the idea. What’s delivered is a flat drama with some admittedly striking nature photography, though the biggest survival struggle becomes that of your own attention span.
Edee (Wright) moves to a log cabin in the middle of nowhere in the Rockies, getting off the grid with a sort of reckless disregard for her own well-being. It’s less suicide by frontiersmanship than a total and seemingly hasty withdrawl from civilization, though it still seems like it could be the former from time to time considering Edee’s sad attempts to do everything from chop wood to plant a garden to simply strike a match. It’s honestly hard to believe she survives for as long as she does on her own—let alone long enough to howl “It’s not working!” into the winter’s snow after a particularly unsuccessful hunt.
Further separating this script from a regular ol’ survival story, where Edee would slowly gain skills over a series of montages and Castaway-like revelations, are inelegantly brandished flashbacks and dream sequences hinting at the loss that drove her out here in the first place. The murky dark of the city, with shadowy home interiors and therapist offices, is just as dull to look at as their drama is to watch, while Edee’s dreamy hallucinations have a facile halcyon outline. That’s too bad, because aside from these on-the-nose segments, Wright’s compositions are sometimes quite beautiful—though it’s hard to make the lush evergreens, rivers and mountaintops of the West look anything but.
Teasing out her (quickly apparent) loss, which I won’t spoil because the film insists that teasing it out is worth something, cheapens the drama by conflating it with mystery. All of this complicates the contrived question the screenplay soon asks, which is does Edee really want solitude, or does she just need a handsome survivalist friend?
Enter the Rugged Caring Mountain Man, Miguel (Demián Bichir), the kind of guy with nothing better to do than drop everything and be a full-time caregiver to a random newbie. “You’re a good heart, Miguel,” says Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), the Native American woman who does most of the initial rescuing and nothing much else. Miguel is a kind of romance novel saint, a burly bear with a pelt of flannel and salt-and-pepper hair that spends his time delivering clean drinking water to reservations and teaching hapless city folk the ropes. He also seems to share Edee’s trauma almost exactly and looks a whole hell of a lot like her dead husband. Don’t worry, he’s not a ghost nor a figment of her imagination, though it would be more interesting if either were the case.