DOUBLE DUTY

STAR EXPLORES GRIEF AND FRIENDSHIP FROM IN FRONT OF AND BEHIND CAMERA

Edee Mathis is a character role most actresses would dream about. It's all-immersive, for sure. It requires a good deal of emotional heavy lifting. But it's also the sort of role that wins Academy Awards.

Robin Wright plays the haunted protagonist in the starkly beautiful drama Land. For a portion of the film's short running time, Edee is literally fighting for survival in the unforgiving wilds of Wyoming while also caught in the grip of unwavering grief.

So it's hardly surprising that she has already garnered some Oscar buzz for her powerhouse performance.

But Wright did not want to play Edee Mathis. She tells Postmedia the conversation she had with producers when they asked her to take on the lead.

“I was like, `I don't wanna do it!'” she says, breaking into an exaggerated whine.

It's not that she didn't recognize Edee as a compelling challenge. But Land, available on demand, is also Wright's feature-film directorial debut. So she sensibly assumed this task would be more than enough to keep her occupied without the added demands of taking on a weighty, emotionally draining role. She had approached several actresses about playing Edee. But the pieces never fell into place. And in the fickle world of film financing, timing is everything. The movie was scheduled for a 29-day shoot in the Alberta wilderness and there was only a short window of time to catch all the seasons required for the plot. A cast had to be secured and, presumably, a star was needed for the lead.

“I wanted to be behind the camera,” says Wright. “But we didn't have a choice. I was like `Well, I'm going to be there anyway ...'”

Obviously, there is no evidence of this reluctance in her performance. If taking on the double-duty rigours of acting and directing was distracting, it certainly doesn't show in what Wright achieved in front of the camera or captured behind it. It helps that she had already spent a good deal of time thinking about Edee. The script had gone through numerous rewrites in pre-production. It became a lengthy process of deciding what to reveal and what to keep hidden about Edee's past.

“We talked about it for over a year,” Wright says. “Who is this character? We were developing new scenes to put in the movie that weren't there in the beginning. Erin Digman, the writer (with Jesse Chatham), is one of my oldest and dearest friends and she wrote a lot of dialogue that wasn't in there before. There used to be multiple scenes of Edee's past life. So you got way more information about what was.”

With a running time of just under 90 minutes, Land at first seems like a simple tale set against an imposing wilderness. By the time the editors had whittled it down, much of the backstory explaining the details that led to Edee's desperate reclusiveness were gone. Clearly, she has suffered a tragedy so consuming that she felt the need to shut herself away from human contact.

There are hints of what she has lost through flashbacks of a happier time with a husband and child. But much is left unsaid, at least until the very end. It's a rarity for a Hollywood movie, but the thinking seemed to be that less is more.

“The script went through many iterations,” Wright says, “and then I got to the editing room and, with our incredible two editors, we all said that we were being pulled out of the movie emotionally, that we're not continuing this journey with this person in the present. The elliptical memories seemed necessary because that is something we do. It's almost like this fleeting vignette that goes through your mind. You don't remember with audio. You're just remembering the visual: The way that person turned his head and looked at you. So we just ended up with that. We streamlined. We took out all of the information because you find out the information in the end anyway.”

The film begins with Edee in deep mourning and checking out from life. She moves to a cabin in the Wyoming wilderness but soon discovers she doesn't have the required skills to survive off the grid, particularly in a harsh winter.

After a life-saving, lastminute intervention from strangers, she reluctantly accepts the help of hunter Miguel Borras (Demián Bichir), a local sorting through his own emotional wounds. He gently teaches her the skills to survive and both begin to heal through friendship.

It is undeniably a minimalist and meditative film, despite the grandeur of the backdrop. But Wright saw elemental themes beneath a simple story that is ultimately hopeful. While filmed before the COVID-19 pandemic, she says there was something about the story that seemed to resonate with the troubled times the U.S. has endured in the past few years.

“I think this message is so beautiful and so pure,” she says. “Yes, it's about loss and grief and everybody deals with it differently. Our country was going through so much of that. This movie is so uplifting in the end. It is about human kindness and human resilience and a renewed sense of hope when you think you've lost all hope and that you will never get out of that terrible feeling you have when you lose someone.”

She shot Land in the small town of Didsbury and at Moose Mountain in Alberta's Kananaskis Country. It was not easy. Facing 100 km/h winds and two massive dumps of snow, the production was shut down three times atop the mountain.

Alberta, true to form, offered what Wright has described as “the most extreme, unpredictable weather patterns I've ever encountered,” and it was “a lot of work and not a lot of sleep.”

IT IS ABOUT HUMAN KINDNESS AND HUMAN RESILIENCE.

DANIEL POWER / FOCUS FEATURES Robin Wright was reluctant to take the starring role in the new movie Land, her feature-film directorial debut. But with her crew, including director of photography Bobby Bukowski, she delivered on both counts and the film is available to stream now.