Review: The Unknown Country (2023)
Lily Gladstone is everything in this road trip movie
The Unknown Country (2023)
Written and directed by Morrisa Maltz
My wife got through the COVID era by fleeing, as we referred to it, from San Francisco to the desert. She’d drive over the Sierras on I-80 blasting the Killers album “Sam’s Town” and stay in a motel in Fallon, or Wells, or in a Reno casino. or in an AirBnB outside Twentynine Palms. After a few days, or a few weeks, she’d come home refreshed, able to face the strictures of the pandemic.
Secretly, she was in mourning. After getting a PhD. from UC Berkeley, her academic career hadn’t turned out the way she’d been led to expect. Suffering in a neglected state university in a forgotten western city, she quit to move back to San Francisco and marry me. Getting a job in the tech industry was a fresh beginning, and she loves San Francisco, but it took her a long time and a lot of miles on western highways for her to put to rest her academic dream.
In “The Unknown Country” — released early this autumn just before she ascended to stardom in her breakthrough role in Martin Scorsese’s epic “Killers of the Flower Moon”1 — Lily Gladstone’s character Tana is mourning too. When the movie starts with her revving up a white Cadillac and driving away from a snow-covered Minneapolis, we don’t know she’s just spent months taking care of, and burying, her grandmother. We don’t know that the car, an extremely uncool vehicle for a young modern woman, was grandma’s. For a while, we’re not even sure Tana knows where she’s going.
As with any mourning period, time stretches as she drives west. Snowy landscape after landscape passes by through the windshield and behind the rural gas stations and motels. She’s a radio listener, so we hear a montage of fundamentalist admonitions, angry political ranting, weather and crop reports. COVID is unheard of; the time seems to be early in the Trump administration.
She winds up in the South Dakota home of her cousin Lainey (Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, who along with Gladstone receives a story credit). We finally learn that she’s made the trip to attend Lainey’s wedding; and also that she and her family are Native American. From there she goes to “the res” and visits her grandfather.
We’re halfway through the movie now, and what’s passed as its plot is more a succession of sweeping snowy vistas. Now the narrative — what there is of it — comes into focus. According to her grandfather (Richard Ray Whitman) his wife, as a young woman, had a traveling bug, and from time to time would leave the reservation and travel across the country. Seems she, too, liked to flee.
He presents Tana with a symbol of this restlessness: her grandmother’s suitcase. He also gives her a mysterious picture of her grandmother, taken in a beautiful but unknown landscape. He doesn’t know where the picture was taken, only that she liked to go to Texas.
Tana turns south to find the picture’s setting and, presumably, to discover more about her ancestor. With the help of some random people with whom she spends a fun-filled day in Dallas (!) — one of these youths identifies the picture’s setting as Texas’s Big Bend country, on the border with Mexico — she succeeds. More gorgeous landscapes, this time of desert country. It’s never explained what drew her grandmother to Texas or to the very out-of-the-way Big Bend (now a national park).
There are certainly road trip movies with less of a narrative — “Two Lane Blacktop,” with fewer words of dialogue than you could print in 12 point type on a cereal box, comes to mind — but what’s missing here is a sustained vision on the part of director Morrisa Maltz. Reviewers have compared the vistas in this film, many taken from a helicopter, to those of Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”). Yes, they’re gorgeous, and Maltz also knows how to capture the small-town taverns, quirky festivals, and neon signs of motels and diners. (A lot of credit is due to cinematographer Andrew Hajek, lensing his first feature film. Almost every frame, in fact, is beautiful.)
These vistas count for a lot, but what really gets you through the film is star Lily Gladstone. She has a practically symbiotic relationship with the camera. This is different from saying, as one sometimes says of other performers — Margot Robbie in “Barbie” is an example — that “the camera loves her.” The sense in “The Unknown Country” is that the camera and Gladstone seem to exist on a par with one another, silently communicating on a secret wavelength like twins, or a brilliant artist and their muse. Though she often has less to do than the other characters in a scene (partly because of the thin script), her energy and presence fill every frame she’s in. “The Unknown Country” is worth seeing for Gladstone alone; indeed, she’s the reason why almost anyone would see it.
There’s more to say. Several odd short documentary sequences about the lives of real small town figures who play themselves in scenes with Gladstone, interrupt a narrative that’s already shaky about what’s fiction and what’s real. I was confused when these cropped up. The narrative is thin enough; I didn’t need these characters fleshed out by their real selves.
Furthermore, and paradoxically for a movie that relies on its genuine quality, the depictions of the Native reservation on the one hand and the city of Dallas on the other are certainly rosy. I can’t say how realistically life on the reservation is depicted, but I know for a fact that the city of Dallas is one of the most boring and culturally bleached cities I’ve ever been to, not the fun-fest it’s made to seem.
And finally, after all the stress on realism throughout the picture, the ending, where Tana wanders through a rocky and cactus-strewn Texas landscape barefoot (!) is positively unrealistic. It seems to demand that the viewer imbue the scene with some kind of metaphysical meaning. For once, Gladstone’s presence alone cannot carry the weight.
Nevertheless, you should see this gentle, beautiful movie, and anyone who’s a Gladstone fan (and who could not be, in 2023?) will.
I haven’t seen “Killers of the Flower Moon,” so I’m judging this work entirely on its own terms.