Movie Review: The Cold Lands (2013)

Available on VOD
(Coming Soon to DVD)

“What are you, Jack Kerouac?” a twenty-first century version of a Beat Generation Dharma Bum who lives off the grid and sells Native American style wrap jewelry asks the eleven-year-old protagonist (Silas Yelich) in writer/director Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands.

And even without the reference to Kerouac or the fact that our young hero’s onscreen name is (the most likely To Kill a Mockingbird inspired noble handle) Atticus, Gilroy’s Ken Loachian like neorealist cinematic slice-of-life about a suddenly orphaned child left to fend for himself in the cold upstate New York wooded lands of the Catskills Mountains carries with it a distinctly literary air.

Part Huckleberry Finn and part Antoine Doinel, the young boy whose loving but sickly hardworking mother (tenderly played by Lili Taylor) passes away while the child is at a birthday party tries to honor all of the home-schooled teachings and values of his bohemian mother who’d told him it’s best to be self-sufficient.

Avoiding the authorities on the hunt to turn the bright yet admittedly sheltered Atticus into a ward of the state, the child retreats into the woods as a lonesome traveler determined to stay off the societal grid, even if he must run away or venture on the road to keep free.

Meeting his own fellow lost man-child in the form of the hippie jewelry craftsman Cutter (a terrific Peter Scanavino) while trying to steer clear of tweakers and hunters, the elder mannish boy decides almost involuntarily to take Atticus under his unorthodox Boo Radley-like wing.

Giving him a punk haircut to alter his appearance and avoid detection from locals who’ve dutifully plastered photos of the boy around the town, Cutter even goes so far as to purchase a secondhand pair of glasses that will help Atticus see his new surroundings a bit more clearly.

Of course, that’s an obvious metaphor for the journey the two go on wherein Atticus’s eyes are opened to a whole new world. Yet to his credit, Gilroy admirably keeps the same low-key, fly-on-the-wall approach he used to open the film throughout – caring less about concrete plot twists, inciting incidents or script gimmicks than he does about letting the borderline father/son or choose-your-own family dynamic between the two play out naturally.

Understanding the complexities of the burgeoning relationship, Gilroy keeps us on our toes by realistically illustrating the emotional rollercoaster the two embark on as well as their constantly evolving thought-process as they try to figure out what to do from a moral and practical standpoint.

Another riveting yet subtle, understated exploration of an unlikely friendship among two characters that most likely would never have given each other more than a passing glance had extraordinary circumstances not caused them to cross paths, in The Cold Lands, Gilroy revisits the same terrain he navigated in his previous, masterful two-hander Spring Forward.

Although the stunning simplicity of the work that can be appreciated on a literary, literal or simply cinematic level doesn’t pack the same punch of his pitch-perfect Spring Forward, Lands serves up one of the strongest, emotionally surprising and downright affecting “a star is born” turns by a young performer since Jennifer Lawrence’s Oscar nominated breakthrough in Winter’s Bone.

A natural progression of the themes touched on in his Spring Forward, you could almost view Lands as if it were a nontraditional sequel in the same vein of Sofia Coppola’s first three features.

Less talkative and more contemplatively cinematic than Spring, Lands finds Gilroy expanding upon the same mentor/protégée, father/son (regardless of blood) dynamic he introduced in Spring while simultaneously spring-boarding off of traditional coming-of-age structural elements.

And while opening the eyes of its audience by way of its remarkable young lead, Gilroy presents us with an unpretentious yet thought-provoking portrait of life being lived in our own wooded backyard we’ve never seen before in quite the same way.

A highly recommend indie sleeper and compelling character study – much like a great novel, The Cold Lands will linger in the mind for days.

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Spring Forward

Director: Tom Gilroy

I happened to stumble upon Spring Forward accidentally at a local library one evening and noticing that Liev Schreiber was involved, took it home on a whim. After viewing the film, I became angry—not angry at the film itself as it was one of the most gorgeous, understated and moving American films to be released in the last few years but angry that, like many important independent works, it had fallen under the radar in cities other than New York and Los Angeles, left unnoticed on very few video shelves and left to chance to discover in libraries or on Netflix. It’s absurd to me that the latest cross dressing Eddie Murphy film Norbit or even the biggest summer blockbusters get so much advertising on everything from popcorn bags at the local theaters to ads during prime time television. However, movies that truly inspire, movies that are completely without a trace of cynicism, real “people movers” such as The Station Agent and Spring Forward are left by the wayside after being lauded with awards and critical praise from noteworthy critics and festivals across the country while most of the movies on multiple screens at local malls will no doubt earn numerous Razzie nominations. It’s a common problem with money and lack of star power being the most glaring reasoning, however, my goal here is to draw attention to a worthwhile film so I’ll get off my soapbox and urge you to track it down.

As the film opens we meet the always versatile Liev Schreiber who stars as Paul, a recently released convict who’d served time for armed robbery, on his first day on the job working for the local parks system in the Northeast. While Paul is nothing but apologetic and full of soul searching insight which seems to be the result of reading far too many of the new age, spiritual and self-help books available to him on the inside, Paul’s supervisor Murph (Ned Beatty who has never been better) is a man with the gift of wisdom, due in part to his age as he nears retirement but also in his ability to cut right down to the heart of any matter, forget all of the ways one can fixate on their situation and just be down-to-Earth and completely in the moment. Over the course of a year, the two begin to have a noticeable effect on one another as what first seems like a traditional coworker relationship evolves into something closer to father and son. It’s a rare thing in American film to see two men bare their soles for the length of a feature film and former award winning playwright Tom Gilroy, who as he told filmcritic.com was inspired by his own relationship with his father, proves to be a natural filmmaker, unafraid of letting scenes play out with silence or just long monologues back and forth, with complete trust in the intelligence of his audience. Other characters come and go including Peri Gilpin (Frasier) and Campbell Scott who both turn in nice little cameos but the most interesting characters, namely Murph’s beloved wife and his dying gay son Bobby who are never seen, are left conspicuously absent, living just as much in our minds as they probably would if we would have actually seen them onscreen. Instead, like most great storytellers, the film (nearly a novel in its own right), lives in our imagination—we feel that we not only know the two characters inside and out but also the people they’re discussing so often. In this summer of endless sequels which don’t expect much from viewers other than to simply rent an air-conditioned seat for two hours, clichéd as it is, the fresh air evident in independent works such as Spring Forward will prove much more satisfying. While most of the summer blockbusters one forgets on the way to finding their car in the parking lot, Spring Forward will stay in your mind for days if not weeks afterward.

Rent Spring Forward