Review: Robin Wright’s Land Celebrates Self-Care at the Expense of Specificity

Retreating from society and embracing nature as a means of self-discovery and mental rehabilitation has been a common American experience since at least the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Like many a frontier-set novel, self-help book, and film before it, Robin Wright’s feature-length directorial debut, Land, conceives of the Western United States as a theater for rebuilding oneself. But while Thoreau, in his day, could return to nature by camping out on a friend’s estate, being a 21st century woman, Edee (Wright) has to go all the way from Chicago to Wyoming to lose and then re-find herself.

Wright and screenwriters Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam put Edee through a crucible of external hardships that symbolize her internal struggles, as they often do in survival narratives. We know that something traumatic has happened in her recent past because a prologue shows us snippets of a therapy session in a darkened office, followed by a lugubrious exchange between Edee and a friend, Emma (Kim Dickens). “I don’t know why I’m still here,” Edee confesses before the scene cuts off, thus leaving us with no specific indication of the source of her despair. Later, flashbacks to this conversation help to fill in that gap, as do briefly held images of a middle-aged man and a young boy that we can infer are Edee’s departed husband, Adam (Warren Christie), and son, Drew (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong).

If the obscuring of backstory is intended to provide some degree of intrigue, a hook for the audience’s attention, then opening simply with Edee’s solemn arrival in Wyoming would suffice to make her ironclad desire to be absolutely alone something of a mystery. As it is, the sappy flashes of Emma’s tear-streaked, pleading face and of Adam and Drew frolicking at some nondescript time and place in the past overload an already familiar plot with downright creaky ways of portraying interiority. Wright and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski work overtime to develop Edee’s psychology via the landscape, giving us a lightning storm at a moment of inner anguish, an image of a lone hawk gliding above the trees to reflect her isolation.

There’s undeniable beauty to the area of Alberta where Land was shot, and for brief stretches, especially during the largely dialogue-free early portion of the film, it’s easy to get lost in its images of nature. Indeed, if the smaller dramas of Edee’s first months in the country are more captivating than the overarching story, that’s because less is being said in them. Edee lacks the closely honed skills and calloused palms that come from country labor. She struggles to use a saw or aim accurately with an axe while trying to prepare firewood, and can’t bring herself to pull the rifle trigger on a buck even when she’s starting to go hungry.

Her foundering at living off the land harkens back to narratives that once had currency in the collective American subconscious. But Land’s effort to revivify this narrative, and with a modern woman at its center, feels strained and oddly imitative, not unlike the way Edee goes about improvising animal traps. The overly psychologized moments of contemplation and the too-brief depiction of the hardships of being alone in the woods may leave you feeling as if the film is doing all the thinking for you, and after a while, it’s hard to repress the thought that, for someone like Edee, the battle with the earth is little more than a lifestyle choice.

Wright’s film acknowledges that there’s a certain amount of privilege implicit in a journey like Edee’s. Following a close brush with death after a roving black bear depletes the woman’s food stores, she tells Miguel (Demián Bichir), one of the only people she happens across in the Wyoming mountains where she’s bought a dilapidated cabin, that he has to leave her be in the woods, no matter the consequences. Miguel quietly observes that “only a person who’s never gone hungry” could consider starvation a bearable fate. Reluctantly agreeing to Miguel’s offer to teach her some of the skills she lacks, she gradually, predictably grows to accept his company and pull away from totally shunning the outside world.

Thereafter, Edee goes from a neophyte to the outdoors to a grizzled survivalist mostly through the power of montage—and the impression of this transformation having been a fast one lessens the extent to which her self-imposed ordeal feels like one at all. One senses that the filmmakers are aiming to evoke the ineffability of the natural human condition, the enigmatic cycle of life and death. But despite the sublime natural environment into which the film throws Edee, there’s very little of the ineffable about either her or her surroundings. Land’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.