THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY (B-minus) - Can you return home to your roots to cure whatever ails you? Isn't it usually the case that the home you knew as a child led to the ills you want to be rid of? This movie is not interested in asking such questions. A classic case of style over substance, this feature debut from Morrisa Maltz celebrates life among the Lakota Nation, following a sorrowful woman as she returns to her grandmother's hometown in South Dakota to attend a relative's wedding.
Lily Gladstone ("Certain Women") stars as Tana, who braves a winter road trip from Minneapolis to the Badlands, and much of the movie involves the highlights of her itinerary -- driving while listening to AM talk radio and stopping at motels and diners. Before falling asleep at night, she likes to stare at a beat-up old photo of a young woman taken in Texas in the 1940s, and by references by others to the loss of Tana's grandmother, it's a safe bet that it's the same woman in the photo.
Maltz shoots this in quasi-documentary style, with non-actors playing the role of family, and a lot of apparently improvised dialogue. She also picks out random people whom Tana meets in passing on her road trip, and the narrative (what little there is) gets sidetracked for a quick little bio of, say, a waitress or a convenience store clerk, each narrating a sliver of a backstory. It's an interesting concept. Do the detours to others represent Tana's failure to fully explore her past or come to terms with it? Are these snippets just in her imagination? Are they voices -- like the ones floating from the radio -- coming to her on a special frequency?
Either way, few of them are interesting. By the halfway point, I decided that I'd have preferred Maltz to dump Gladstone, toss what little script there was, and just shoot a documentary about life on the road and the reservation. She falls back on overly artsy shots -- I stopped keeping track of how many lens flares there were -- but forgets to tell a compelling story. Even at 85 minutes, it dragged. (How many times can we watch Gladstone light a cigarette?) Cinematography props, I suppose, to Andrew Hajek. However, mood and landscapes can get you only so far. Maltz has a pretty clever ending here, but it's a chore to get to, and it's also a little too shmaltzy to feel earned.
The movie comes alive, and Tana's disposition brightens, only when she finally leaves the kinfolk behind and heads to Texas. (Proving my point?) Her smiles no longer seem forced when, in the final reel, she meets a lively, diverse group of young adults in Dallas -- suggesting that strangers and a big city can be just as good an antidote as any family reunion in the impoverished rural America. Maybe I'm reading too much into what Tana was going through -- or maybe I missed the point, or maybe I'm just an old guy trying to help fix her -- but I needed something to do while waiting for the film to get to its own point.
BONUS TRACKS
The soundtrack adds to the moodiness, in a good way. The transition at the one-third mark is accompanied by Beach House, with "Take Care":
Remember Slowdive? Here is "Star Roving" from 2017:
The songs are often sunnier than the cinematography. Here's a lovely song, "Young," by Sun June. It has a Cat Power vibe:
And, at the climax, this jittery tune, "Among the Sef" by Colin Stetson:
And our title track, out of left field, from the Supersuckers:
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