Land, the nondescript and forgettable title of Robin Wright’s directorial debut, has a Clint Eastwood-ish trailer. If you watch any movie directed by Clint Eastwood, it makes it look like it’s a Best Picture nominee. While many of these films earn an Oscar nomination, many more (The 15:17 to Paris, J. Edgar, Hereafter, Changeling, Invictus) not only do not but aren’t even worth a watch. Land is better than those previously mentioned films, but it likely will be just as unmemorable. It is by no means a bad movie. It is, however, a dime-a-dozen movie, and it certainly did not do its enthralling trailer any justice.

Wright (The Princess Bride, Rampart), starring as the film’s lead, continues to seek out her first Oscar nomination in the story of a woman going through the five stages of grief following the tragic, simultaneous deaths of her husband and child. There was early talk that this movie could earn her a Best Actress nomination, but it doesn’t appear that this will be the case even in a weak year. As an aside, one of the biggest injustices in the history of The Academy Awards is her omission as a Best Supporting Actress nominee in Forrest Gump. The film earned 13 Oscar nominations and six wins, but one was not for Wright’s career-defining performance as Jenny. She stole her time on the screen and was a catalyst for Tom Hanks’s career’s most memorable performance. Jenny was the reason for everything that Forrest did in 1994’s Best Picture. Though she won’t earn a nomination for Land, it certainly is not because she wasn’t as convincing as Edee, a youngish mother and wife stricken and unable to process the immensurable grief of losing her entire family. While we learn how they died, it’s a letter reveal. Regardless of how they were lost, it’s the kind of emotional hell that I don’t think any of us can ever truly come to accept. We don’t need to know the exact circumstances to understand and sympathize with the situation.

With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and a slew of medications unable to ease her grief, Edee is in complete denial mode that her life can ever have meaning again. She tells her therapist at a session in the first ten minutes of the film, “Why would I want to share that?” when pressed about discussing her feelings surrounding the loss. It becomes her last therapy session, something that she only agreed to in the first place, which she did to appease her worried sister Emma (Kim Dickens – ABC’s Lost, Gone Girl). On the verge of numerous suicide attempts, we see flashbacks of Edee promising Emma that she will never take her own life. This is the only reason she hasn’t done so yet.

Instead, she packs a Uhaul of survival items that she will need to live in a secluded cabin in the mountains, separated physically from any other human being by miles and miles. Upon arriving at her new home, she makes one final request to the guide who led her to this remote wilderness. She gives him the keys to her car that she used to follow the Uhaul he was driving and asks if someone can come up and drive her away. She has no plans of ever leaving. If isolating herself physically from the rest of the world isn’t symbolic of how alone she feels inside, I don’t know what is. While most of us will, fortunately, never experience this kind of tragedy, many of us have been in a similar situation surrounding some loss or pain. In whatever fashion, we know that we can no longer imagine living in our home, sleeping in the same bed, driving a similar way to work, seeing a known sight, hearing a familiar sound, smelling a recognizable scent, etc. What Edee does, and one that makes a lot of sense to me, is leaving the feeling of familiarity forever. The furthest thing from living in a city as populous as Chicago is moving to the Rocky Mountains, where the hope is that she’ll never see another human being again.

Imagine something so horrible happening to you that the world around you looks entirely different—why not change your setting as significantly as moving from the city of Chicago to the mountains of Wyoming? The location she picked serves as the backdrop for the remaining 90% of the movie, though the destination didn’t necessarily matter to Edee. Her desire was to be rid of people,  feeling the need to explain herself to others or to feel their looks of pity.

Left alone to live off the surrounding land, Edee has plenty of fresh water and enough trees to provide firelogs for her to last a lifetime and keep her warm during the frigid winter months. And while she has enough canned goods to endure her for the future, she knows that she will need to fish and hunt to survive long term, two things she doesn’t know how to do. Predictably, things don’t go well for Edee. The warmth of her cabin and the food rations she relied upon as she slowly taught herself how to fish and hunt suddenly vanished almost as quickly as her son and husband did.

Just as the physical elements (lack of food, freezing winter temperatures) are about to defeat her, much as she wished, comes a hunter named Miguel (Demián Bichir – A Better Life, Alien: Covenant) and a nurse named Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge). The duo saves Edee’s life. While Alawa returns to urban civilization, Miguel stays with Edee, caring for her and restoring her cabin to be habitable. Edee and Miguel slowly become friends. Though he lives in the city, he promises to come back to check on her. He also tells her he will teach her how to fish and hunt. Miguel has won Edee over with his kindness. She takes him up on his offer under one condition. He isn’t allowed to bring her any news from the outside world.

Land is a beautiful film that also always retains its purpose. The landscape is its character, almost foiling Edee at times. There is some additional symbolism in the gorgeousness of the backdrop, and the idea that this same beauty can discreetly hide so many aspects of itself (bears, insects, snowstorms, droughts, fire, floods, extreme heat, etc.) can also kill you. What the film does best is let these elements and its characters play out “naturally.” There is nothing forced or unnatural. Wright does far more with non-verbal communication than she does with cheaper dialogue. Its ending feels a tad rushed and a bit stagy, especially compared to how effortless the ride was up until that point.

Ultimately, Land fails to outperform movies with similar plots that came before it, executed more effectively. The excellent performances from Wright and Bichir weren’t enough to save a story that was almost exactly what we expected it to be. While there were some nuances along the way that added some intrigue and differentiation when all was said and done, it was the experience of a person going through the five stages of grief, with most of the 89-minute runtime spent on the depression stage.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 9/10
Acting 8.5/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
83.5%

B-

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