Butler's Cinema Scene

Robin Wright

“LAND” My rating: B- (Select theaters)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Who hasn’t harbored a dream of retreating to a mountainside home far from the hassles, fears and frustrations of civilization?

Americans seem particularly prone to this Thoreau-esque  fantasy; undoubtedly it has something to do with our shared consciousness of pioneers coming to terms with the wilderness.

It’s all very romantic…until it isn’t.

“Land,” actress Robin Wright’s film directing debut, unfolds in a primitive cabin  where a city dweller, working through an unnamed grief, has taken up residence.

It’s a minimalist effort — very little dialogue, no plot to speak of — that attempts to compensate for its dramatic thinness with gorgeous outdoor cinematography (the d.p. is Bobby Bukowski). If it sometimes seems there’s actually less here than meets the eye…well, at least the eye candy is first class.

Early on we see Edee (Wright) consulting a psychologist and arguing with a woman (Kim Dickens) — her sister? — about her desperate need to get away.

Next thing you know she’s rented a car and a trailer, loaded up on foodstuffs and essentials, thrown away her cell phone and relocated to rural Wyoming.  Basically she’s bought a property — no electricity, no running water — about as far away from other humans as she can get.

To ensure her isolation she hires someone to return the rental car…that way she can’t bail at the first sign of trouble.

As Edee gets used to her new environment she is subjected to visions of a man and young boy (her late husband and son, we assume).  Occasionally, in the midst of breathtaking beauty, she breaks down in helpless tears.

Demian Bichir, Robin Wright

Turns out the great outdoors is a harsh mistress.  A rampaging bear  all but wipes out her food supply.  A blizzard leaves Edee on the edge of starvation and killer frostbite.

She is only spared  a lonely death when  Miguel (Demian Bichir), a local fellow hunting deer, stumbles across her dilemma and nurses Edee back to health.

This puts our heroine in an uncomfortable situation. She’s thankful to have been saved, sure, but actually spending time with another human being is not part of her plan.

Miguel, who seems a prime candidate for sainthood, offers to drop by now and then to give Edee lessons in survival —  hunting, fishing, trapping.  There will be no idle chitchat, no talk of the outside world, and when she’s up to speed, Miguel will simply fade away.

That’s the plan, anyway.   But Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam’s screenplay captures the slowly percolating friendship that develops between the two.  We’re not surprised to learn that, like Edee, Miguel has a tragic past he’s trying to outrun.

In its later stages “Land” comes perilously close to bogging down in bathos; only the skill of the two principal players keeps the enterprise from capsizing.

Wright’s film seems determined to deliver profundities that really aren’t there.  “Land” isn’t really a documentary-style look at surviving in a hostile environment.  It’s not particularly acute, psychologically speaking. Nor is it really about an individual’s relationship with the land.

The film’s sometimes too languid pacing is augmented mightily by a folksy musical score — fiddles sighing against a drifting banjo.

Wright’s performance is largely internalized — not a lot of “big” moments — and she has abandoned anything even remotely resembling glamor…although there’s not much she can do about that devastating bone structure.  Bichir is just about perfect as the  quietly humane Miquel.

At its most poignant the “Land” is about the need for human contact, even among those of us who fiercely deny that impulse.

But even if the message gets muddled, there’s always something gorgeous to look at.

| Robert W. Butler