An Unfinished Portrait: Robin Wright’s Land
Robin Wright’s directorial debut, Land , is a drama about overcoming tragedy and finding your place in the world again, set in a lyrical isolation against the stunning backdrop of the Rockies. It opened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021. The film follows Edee (Wright) as she leaves behind her life in the city and moves into a secluded cabin in the mountains. This is a last resort to process the grief of a tragedy so unspeakable it remains unrevealed until the end of the film. It is always fascinating and exciting to see an actor take on the directorial role and in her portrayal of Edee, Wright delivers a powerful performance. The less-is-more approach in directing allowed her to convey so much emotion without speaking, and imbue the film with Edee’s palpable sadness, which is no easy feat. In Edee’s journey, mental and physical space are conflated and constantly interact with each other, past and present collide, and she wonders in and out of suicidal ideation. She befriends a hunter who teaches her not just physical survival skills, but how to live with herself again. At the same time that Wright’s performance benefits from the general quietness and solitude, the film commits the worst crime a character study can make: not allowing us to get to know its main character. Though it is Wright who would receive the brunt of the criticism for this, to me it is clear that this is an issue with the script, which seems to expend all energy struggling to make a meaningful point about human existence rather than giving its audience someone to connect with.
In essence, the entire film is a visual representation of Edee’s inner turmoil, her slowly coming to terms with it, and gaining the skills necessary to deal with her issues. This is clear from the first act, which is peppered with flashbacks of conversations with her sister Emma, sessions with her therapist, neither of which provide context for Edee’s despair. It is in Edee’s fantasies about a man and a child, which we can read as her husband and son, that we start to gain an insight into her. Visions of them fishing and running around the woods bring her both joy and pain, reminiscing about the past and feeling their absence in the presence of these ghosts. Be they products of her imagination or more, her inner and outer landscapes collide and the mountains become an avenue for self-healing. The backstory comes to a halt by the end of this first act, however, and we are never clued in again on why Edee is embarking on this mission to live self-sufficiently in isolation or die. Did the family have ties to nature, did they go camping as a tradition? This could have been an opportunity to provide information about her family and emphasize their loss through haunting presence. Their brief appearance does not solidify this rupture in Edee’s life, it merely alludes to the fact that her tragedy is of a familial nature. Nothing more about them and nothing more about her.
Land would have functioned much better as a quietly meditative film had it not relied so heavily on a formulaic plot, driven forward by filmic devices. The harsh conditions of survival mirroring Edee’s mental state has already been established. When Edee tosses her cellphone into the trash in a visual cliche, then arranges the car and U-haul that brought her to be removed, she leaves herself no means of contacting the outside world for help. There is something to be said about the precarious state of mind she must have been in to be so irresponsible, and later it becomes more clear that her issues are not merely philosophical, but she might have a deathwish. Still, none of this reads as logical decisions this character might make. Instead, Land’s plot points follow a cause and effect formula in scriptwriting. She can’t ask for help, so when a bear happens to destroy her food supplies, she nearly freezes and starves to death, which is a perfect opportunity for the characters of Miguel and Alawa to be introduced as her rescuers. Then, Miguel can teach her to hunt and fish and bond with her over lost families so that his impact has an emotional dimension too.
The film’s greatest undoing has to be the degree to which it mistrusts its audience. Though the minimal dialogue contributed to both Edee’s quiet resilience and Wright’s performance, those few lines constitute Land's weakest component. In one of the flashbacks, Edee asks her sister, “Why am I still here?”, which Emma gives a literal answer to before Edee retorts, “No. Why am I still here?”. Her emphasis and the double meaning of her words are painfully obvious, one of several lines in the film that are placed so pointedly that it feels like her words hold a lot of weight, but they don’t. This is only the first of many situations in which the film tells what it should show, spoiling the core concepts and all the cheapening the emotion loaded into its subtext. It is so much more rewarding when films allow you to ponder on their meaning, to reach a conclusion on your own. Later, Alawa alludes to the fact Edee is not equipped to live in the mountains on her own, to which she says, “If I don’t belong here, I don’t belong anywhere”. Apart from being rather unnatural, the lines are loaded with thinly veiled meaning that, in the context of the film, did not need to be said to be understood. Just as on the nose is Miguel’s rendition of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, which becomes a running gag in the film. It culminates in Edee joining in singing, a significant moment that shows her growth and their bond. Nature is immense behind them, the mountains now a stand in for the whole world, and by this point we are an hour into a story about mastering nature. It might be a little self-reflexive, but it is mostly cheesy.
By the end of the film, the fact we haven’t got to know Edee very much has taken its toll. Concerned about Miguel’s disappearance, she ventures back into society to look for him, and finds out he will soon succumb to terminal cancer. This prompts a moment of honesty, in which Edee reveals her husband and child were murdered at gunpoint. Though this is shocking, the moment to reveal it is long gone, and the scene does not have the weight it deserved. An earlier reveal could have meant more for Edee’s seclusion and allowed the viewer to feel for her more when she was struggling. Nearing the resolution of the film, it serves no purpose. Miguel gifts her his phone and she calls her sister, bookending the exit from society with a re-entrance. Miguel’s death feels like another filmic device to prompt Edee’s honesty in front of the camera. The fact she is ready to move forward as soon as she speaks about her family’s death seems to suggest that saying it out loud is equal to accepting it. Again, the tragedy’s defining characteristic is that it is unspeakable, and once Edee can say the words out loud, she is set free. This drastically simplifies her journey, then. Her dealing with grief is signified in details, but never truly felt in her character outside her new skills. The language she uses, which has been emphasized before, does not account for a lack of showing. It remains unclear whether Edee has dealt with her grief or is ready to start dealing with it and there is nothing tangible about her future to give a satisfying interpretation to this open ending. As such, there is no closure.
Overall, Land makes the mistake of assuming time spent with a character is enough to know and love them. Rather, Edee is a muted character that only reveals herself to explain her philosophy in an overly obvious manner. There is no room for interpretation or self-reflection. This is a shame considering how much space the film gives to shots of nature. In those pauses we could have found introspective moments, time to take in the film and ponder on its lessons. It is a stark contrast with the grittiness of Edee’s first time chopping wood, being stalked by a bear, remembering her past and hurting. Yet these shots never achieve their full potential to either say more or let us think more. Like Edee, they’re given the time but not the means. Lacking context in the beginning, not gaining much as the story unfolds, and ending without much indication of the future, the film feels unfinished. Following a protagonist whose mind we never got inside of, we exit the story the same way we entered it, not really knowing anything at all.
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