Mark Reviews Movies: LAND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 11, 2021

At first, Land is about isolation—the feeling of it, the desire for it, the harsh reality of it. A woman from the city, having suffered a tremendous loss and finding no way to cope with it, moves to the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. She's looking for peace and mostly for quiet, but as romantic and grand as the allure and sights of this place may be, there is neither peace nor quiet to be had.

The film stars Robin Wright as that woman, named Edee, and it is also the actor's feature directorial debut. There is a starkness and sparseness to both Wright's performance and filmmaking in this lengthy opening section. It offers no narration, no scenes of Edee speaking to herself about what has happened to her and how she plans to survive in the wild, and no legitimate flashbacks to her life before moving to this place.

Edee is alone, having tossed her cellphone in the trash in a town miles from her cabin on a hill and arranged for her rental car to be returned, with only the mountains, the trees, the animals, and the day-to-day needs of basic survival to offer some distraction. In her moments away from those sights and concerns, there are only memories of the people she has lost—all the more painful on account of how happy those recollections are.

The key here is how much patience and restraint Wright possesses in presenting these early scenes. We have a brief prologue of sorts, as Edee talks to a therapist, whose advice offers no help or solace, and then to her sister Emma (Kim Dickens), whose worry for Edee becomes the only thing that keeps the grieving woman going. "I don't feel like I belong here," Edee tells Emma, who takes the "here" to be city—a place of so many people and such noise and so many constant reminders of the life Edee once had. Edee corrects the assumption, adding a broader emphasis on "here" so that the sister really understands.

Then, Edee is off, heading west in a car with a moving trailer in tow. Upon arriving in a little town, she throws away her cellphone as Emma is calling her. A local real estate agent takes Edee to her new property, a wide swath of land in the mountains—"honey land," the man calls it, because it has everything a person who knows how survive off the land could need.

Edee, though, is learning how to live in nature on the fly. With the car gone, she only has the canned food and bottled water she brought with her, before she has to really figure out how grow food, trap it, and hunt it in order to stay alive.

We watch. We see her attempt assorted projects, such as a garden and regular fishing trips and collecting water from a nearby river. We observe her failing over and over again. There are visions or memories of a man (played by Warren Christie) and a child (played by Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), and from the looks on Edee's face, we know exactly who these people are—her husband and son—and that, in this world, they are now only memories or visions to Edee. The film tells us nothing about them beyond that, because Edee doesn't want to remember, can't bear to even look at tangible reminders of these two, and has come to this place in order to forget.

What happened to these two might seem like a mystery to be solved or answered, but Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam's screenplay treats the fate of Edee's husband and son as a cold, hard fact. They are gone. Edee remains. She will stay as long as she is able, and perhaps, the awareness that she might not be able to survive in a way of life that is completely foreign to her is part of the bargain she has made with herself.

Her work toward the basics of living off the land fail. Winter arrives. A bear puts an end to the food stores with which she arrived. It looks like the end.

In a way, it is. With the introduction of a pair of chance saviors, the story takes on an entirely different tone, approach, and sense of purpose. One of Edee's rescuers is Miguel (Demián Bichir, embodying a kind of matter-of-fact benevolence), a stoic but kind-hearted man who noticed the smoke—and then absence of it—from the cabin's chimney while on a hunting expedition. The other is Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), Miguel's friend and a nurse at the hospital in town. The two revive Edee, tend to her health, and allow her to have her privacy about the reason she has come to this place.

The rest of the film follows the growing friendship—and only a friendship, which comes as a bit of a refreshing shock—between Edee and Miguel, who teaches her how to survive in more ways than just hunting. He has also suffered a painful loss. If there's restraint in the filmmakers' depiction of Edee's initial solitude at the cabin, there is almost as much in the scenes between Edee and Miguel, who don't need to say or explain much about themselves or their pasts for a deep connection, based on the almost instinctual awareness and knowledge of grief, to be made.

Land, then, is about isolation at first, but it becomes about connection—to the land, to others, to oneself. It's a quiet, thoughtful, and subtle film (Note, in particular, how Wright handles the major revelation of Edee's past—not as a moment for her, but to solidify how strong the bond between her and Miguel has become), which knows that silence can be just as potent as words.

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