An unexpected invitation rushes a grieving young woman into a lonely road trip through the American Midwest toward the border between Texas and Mexico.
Making a movie is hard, expensive, and backbreaking work. If you’re lucky you get just enough money to hire somebody besides yourself. You try to pull off a ‘vision’ and in the end, you’re forced to make decisions for expediency rather than pure artistry. Nothing about the work of filmmaking boils down to sheer artistry and so many have attempted to use these constraints to put a cinematic portrait leaning more on impressions than on anything specific. “The Unknown Country” features many such quick shortcuts used by filmmakers to craft a ‘vibe.’ Many cite late-stage cinema poetic influences like Terrence Malick or Chloe Zhao (the comparison to “Nomadland” for this movie is prevalent.) Still, those filmmakers work because of their specificity of vision and not because of the ability to add lens flares. “The Unknown Country” employs many techniques lambasted across the indie world for padding runtimes. Its minimalist lighting and cinematography attempt a wandering focus but ultimately frustrates the viewer. With a central narrative component attempting to weave together interviews with real-life figures, the two ideas end up tainting each other in a web that tangles downwards until the very end with an ending so predictable it could be forecasted after the first thirty minutes.
This movie works off of two “stories” or ideas. First, Lily Gladstone is playing the role of Tana. A woman set adrift from her world after the death of her grandmother decides to take a road trip down from Minnesota to Texas to grieve. As she travels she meets strange friends, family, and visitors. She attends a cousin’s native wedding. A stranger at a gas station follows her for a few miles. She spends quite some time in the wonderful city of Dallas. Woven into this centerpiece narrative are several interviews with real-life figures: gas station attendants, late-night diner waitresses, and a few indigenous people on the eve of their wedding. They are real people. Their stories are real. Yet, somehow, this film purports that their real-life stories mesh with Tana’s grief journey somehow blending the two, making one fictional and the other more real.
Unfortunately, the weaving complexity works the opposite effect and diminishes the craft at play in the film. Some of the interviews feel more staged and some of the staged scenes feel impromptu. Gladstone’s entire night out in Dallas feels conscripted to be made up entirely and only in the generic bland way that actors can afford when a director gives them direction like ‘now have fun!’ It’s an unfortunate blending that turns this movie inside out and makes what everyone likes about it so hard for me personally.
Technical-wise, it leaves a lot to be desired. The Blu-ray™ audio mix wavered between too low and way too loud. Dialogue sounded clearly off somebody else’s microphone. The entire time I rode the volume knob on my audio setup trying to balance loud with soft and giving up at some point, consigned to having my eardrums blown out during the needle drops. The lighting composition felt lackluster and while it may be called ‘naturalistic,’ even that descriptor feels generous to this lighting. The film grain crept into every dark frame and every neon-tinged shot. If the scene happened at night the only lights present were regular lights painting the character in unnecessary shadow. The camera focus wandered so often, failing to miss its mark, what seemed like a choice felt more like a learning curve. What feels like a forgivable indie aesthetic (the classic up-close face shot, sunny lens flare, and wandering focus) lasted so long that it outlived its usefulness. The big picture edit followed a simple routine of Lily Gladstone looking sad, meeting someone, responding happily, and then driving away to look sad somewhere else.
For a movie described as a road story, it spends so much time at similar locations: motels, dance halls, bars, and gas stations. It fails to differentiate any of these locations from each other implying a sameness to the little earmarks stashed across the American countryside. The only big city it meanders through is my hometown of Dallas and the locations most utilized are centered on the city skyline.
For such a grand actress, the film underutilizes Lily Gladstone to a criminal degree. Her most emotional beat comes out of nowhere when she weeps into her pillow one night. We’re not told why she’s sad until the final fifteen minutes of the film but the way she cried I suspected she lost a child. Instead, she lost her grandmother.
This is a film that has a lot on its heart. From director Morrisa Maltz’s documentary background, it pulls dangerous instincts to simply frame something pretty and put it on camera. Too much leaning on those ideas makes the film feel obscure and hazy. Long slow-motion B-roll shots with bluesy guitar music repeat itself over and over again. This film wants to be an emotional journey of grief for its protagonist. It wants to celebrate the mundane corners of the American heartlands. It wants to tell Native stories, even if somebody else has to say what that story should be. Maltz reflected on the film as an imitation of a drive she herself made multiple times in the late 2010s. Unfortunately, she may be too close to this idea to have executed it in any meaningful way. Like many great writers trying to encapsulate a mood, the more specific the vision the more endearing it will be. With so little specificity other than a sense that the director wanted to put something pretty on camera, this film sinks rather than soars. It’s at its best when it’s poring over the American Tundra, showing off what would be beautiful, regardless of what movie you saw it in. The biggest success is simply capturing what’s already gorgeous. This movie can be a lot more and I sincerely hope to see Maltz grow into more methodical and thorough filmmaking (both in pre-and post-production) so that these intentional elegiac poems of grief actually play like they’re supposed to.
Now available on Blu-ray™ from Music Box Films
