The Cold Lands

Greetings again from the darkness. A favorite at some film festivals, this little film starts off very strong and captures our attention with the odd, yet fascinating dynamic between mother (Lili Taylor) and adolescent son Atticus (newcomer Silas Yelich). She spends much of her day committed to making sure her son learns to be self-sufficient. Their borderline off-the-grid minimalistic lifestyle has her also teaching him history and music. This is definitely not Hanna, where the parent teaches the kid to be an assassin.

Teasing a theme of The State vs The Individual, the story suffers once untreated diabetes removes mom from the picture, leaving Atticus to fend for himself. Having Atticus meander aimlessly through the forest makes sense given his background, but the story loses all focus at this point. Unfortunately it doesn't really regain traction when Atticus latches on to the free-spirited hippie Carter (Peter Scanavino). Carter becomes a quasi-father figure and big brother, but his endless stream of screw-ups can't be offset by his hand-crafted jewelry. He attempts to sell the goods at hippie festivals seemingly designed for pot smoking and skinny dipping.

With this beautifully photographed film, writer/director Tom Gilroy could have used a bit more attention to the script. The mother-son story easily could have lingered longer, and the Carter-Atticus story needed a bit more direction - more than just making the point that Carter has mostly good intentions. Young Silas Yelich looks really good on screen, but is given little to do, so we aren't sure what to expect with his future work.

With some elements of Mud and Running on Empty, the look and feel of the movie gets us set up for a nice indie treat. Unfortunately, the script lets us down in the second half.

One key to understanding this movie is to understand the parallel between 1) the inspired spirit of early Americans with their desire to build a whole new world from the ground up with their own two hands, and their absolute foundational belief in personal responsibility and individual freedom and willingness to die for their freedoms (Atticus' mother alludes to all this when she's reading aloud the details of the rent wars, and the *Catskills historical marker at the end of the film re-enforces all this) and 2) the current dispirited spirit of a generation of people who consider the system failed and ultimately opt to walk out of civil society (into the "cold lands" - an existence outside of society, disenfranchised, marginalised....but the same "cold lands" where people once upon a time built an entire nation from the ground up) and live a life of pure individual freedom and off-the-grid like Atticus's mother, like Carter, like all the country-crossing flea market/swap meet vendors.

This film is all about the scattering of this long-fractured spirit, and whether or not there's any hope of a wind strong enough to catch these scatterings and glue them together to rebuild this fractured America.

Carter (Peter Scanavino) was nude because he was naturalistic and uninhibited, he represented the early Americana nude male in a natural landscape Carter appears to have lived off the grid in woodland wilderness for a very long time, possibly a decade or more, people who live like that, especially people born into off-the-grid regions within the Catskills, are living a life of abject poverty with no electricity, sleeping nude and swimming nude are natural, as is outdoor bathing ( Plenty of young people love swimming nude, and plenty of people sleep in the nude, but the film goes beyond that ) Catskills (filming location) = Hudson River School of art = plethora of paintings depicting nude males in natural landscapes (looking at you, Thomas Eakins) Carter laid down in a choreographed manner, modelling his chiselled physique, almost like he stepped out of an Eakins painting Carter at the cliff with the rolling water with the other young men was straight out of "Kindred Spirits" by Asher Brown Durand, young kindred spirits on a cliff spiriting amidst an impenetrable green wilderness backdrop of boundless woodlands and forested mountains Atticus' mother was raising Atticus to mature into that same early Americana naturalist, uninhibited, complete-individual-freedom-and-release frame of mind-and-spirit Carter's nature carted Atticus further towards maturing into that frame of mind-and-spirit

Important life truths are not often enough depicted realistically in modern-day film; too often extremes or violence are used. How pleasing to enjoy a film designed to rely to a large degree the honest emotions of the three main actors in this modern-day off-the-beaten-path play. The beauty of nature permeates much of it; sound and cinematography are top notch as are the smooth edits propelling our protagonist forward. Script is sparse and rounded; we are usually left to determine true meaning from context and body language. To me, this is a hallmark of mature adult story telling.

What are the life truths revealed here? A shocking loss and separation from the cocoon of a caring family forces a child to make decisions on his own while leveraging their teachings. Eluding the potential social net captivity leads to a kinder albeit undisciplined friendship with a similar lost soul. The threads of living a life day to day, making do with fundamentals - ones wits, learned abilities and deficits - weave throughout the tale. We learn key morals and truths such as right and wrong, respect and human interaction are all intertwined with a positive attitude and connection to the natural world, not through rigorous dogma or materialism. Touchingly simple yet fine production, message and approach. For me, time well spent.