Based on Denis Johnson's novella (2011) of the same name. (I wasn't a fan of his famous collection of shorts.) Mostly for the cast — Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Kerry Condon (Breaking Bad (2008-2013), The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)), not Felicity Jones (Rogue One (2016), The Brutalist (2024)) — and the promising-by-their-recent-IMDB-ratings combination of co-writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar.
American bucolic. In the early decades of the twentieth century, socially-isolated lumberjack Edgerton finds himself in Idaho where Jones unfathomably finds him irresistible. Even after a daughter arrives he disrupts his domestic bliss with long trips, west to the Pacific, east to Montana (something like that), for work. Soon enough the only fathomable tragedy occurs and he resumes his hermitude. (It's not like someone could have stolen his idea for a social network though just maybe they may have thieved a building block concept he dreamt up for his child.) He thoughtlessly avoids modernity, is mystified by a chainsaw. It's mostly one thing after another spiced up with endless flashbacks and flashforwards; he's aware but not that expressive or outwardly reflective. Things land with some healing not via Kelly Condon's fellow hermit (she appears to be facially converging with Toni Collette) but via the wonders of sightseeing from a biplane: ultimately he's "connected to it all".
I felt it was elegiac, sombre hokum, reflecting the mood of the present time, the primordial desire to return to a prelapsarian monoculture. It is a vote against finding redemption or solace in other people (the Condon vector) but inertia definitely leads to hermitude. Some heavy themes treated shallowly.
On the cinematic front Bentley and DP Adolpho Veloso were clearly reaching for Malick's pristine unspoilt wilderness, Rousseau's man in some kind of natural state. There's a sense of it being an uncomplicated, unsophisticated complement of First Cow (2019). On the other hand it stands against Viggo Mortensen's The Dead Don't Hurt (2023) by lacking a target for revenge; nature doesn't test a temperament in anything like the same way. The logging scenes were not a patch on Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and it generally lacked the wild inventiveness of Ken Kesey. Edgerton is good in the lead and surely up for an Oscar nom. Macy with the explosives, an early enviro mystic. Narration by Will Patton! At least some of the soundtrack was by Nick Cave (says IMDB).
Peter Sobczynski: an Academy fight song. Justin Chang summarised it and analysed its deviations from its source material for the New Yorker. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Days of Heaven (1978). Peter Bradshaw: four stars. "His emotional life is the tree that falls in the forest without making a sound."
