The old white sedan sputters through the American West. On the radio, divisive static metamorphizes through fractured speech, a sonic blend of ephemeral exterior stress. Inside the sedan sits Lily Gladstone as Tana, our stillest and most powerful actor of this very moment. She portrays, in all her stillness, equal parts hope and melancholy. In Morissa Maltz’s stunning debut feature, documentary blends with fiction. The actors in the movie are often just real people, playing themselves and America is playing itself too: icy and foreboding and yet endlessly warm and ever-changing. As Gladstone’s Tana drives from Minnesota to South Dakota and on through Texas, the film, the people in it, and the country itself, all undergo a radical transformation, until we’ve arrived from the bitter North, full of grief and loss, to the sun-coated South, so full of unknown country and the kind of unending possibility that makes it exceptionally American.
There is such a bright model working underneath the hood of this road movie, which takes all the division and separation of a modern America, searching deep inside the heart of the country, and emerges with a glowing, compassionate heart for the people it celebrates. In this journey which seems to be spurned from the same energies as Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) (#VanLife), Morissa Maltz finds an even more striking internal story within the same model in The Unknown Country (#SedanLife). The film becomes, both for fans of the aforementioned film and for folks who found it to be celebratory of transient misery, a warmer center and a more personal exploration of the land, utilizing the contrasts and contours of people, spaces, and places, to graph its own map of an America that is both treacherous and richly rewarding to travel alone.
What happens most of the time is that Lily Gladstone is on-screen and everything else seems to disappear. Same sensation you will get watching her in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) & Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon — Gladstone seems to invent a new way of being on camera just by holding still. The movie covers so much space and yet all of it happens on Gladstone’s face. The way Gladstone shows us not just what she feels but how she holds space, feels once again like a revelation. There is every possibility she is one of our best actors. Through Gladstone, we understand the movies and everything they can do, this small film becomes grandiose and full of feeling and movement. There is every possibility that this awards season, Gladstone is competing with herself.
There is always space for stunning tone poems. America lends itself so well, as the Westerns understood it, as this map of opportunity, wherein you can leave any kind of bad situation, and find any kind of new situation, full of opportunity, wherever it is you end up. This is, in its own way, another kind of modern Western. Unlike the other contemporary Westerns made by men, which insist that one way of life is over for everyone, these new quasi-Westerns made by women seem to have another, alternative outcome. The West is not at all gone. It sits just where it was, full of compassion and space to find oneself. Same as it always was but now new filmmakers are showing us something new about it. It is our duty to listen and embrace the New Western, because just as all the films are about finding oneself and rediscovering compassion, these films hold the same truth for the audience, reminding us that if we go looking for it, there’s deep love and a joyous vision of self-discovery for all of us to find.