Land - Robin Wright

LAND - Official Trailer [HD] - In Theaters February 12
Focus Features

Kind of a cool movie. Warning: it's a little depressing given that it's about a severely depressed woman, but she gets better. She is so depressed she can't stand being around other people. She made an excellent comment about her condition, but I can't recall it now. I've been clinically depressed and her portrayal was spot on.

She can't stand being around other people, so she packs up, heads to Wyoming, fills a U-Haul trailer full of supplies, buys a piece of land with an abandoned cabin way out in the boonies and attempts to live there. Things don't go so well, she nearly dies, but then a hunter notices that while there was smoke coming from her cabin recently, there isn't now and goes to check on her. She recovers and he proceeds to teach what she needs to know to survive out there. Very cool.

I'm watching this on HBO last night and I realize that living off the land like that, walking around in the wilderness, hunting, trapping, gathering, that's what we were made for. Not necessarily deliberately, but if you were designing an animal to survive in those conditions, a human being would be ideal.

This civilization we have built doesn't engage us as completely as surviving in the wilderness would, which might be why we are constantly inventing new forms of entertainment. War was one of the first and continues to be very popular. Video games, which are often war simulations, are the latest. All this blather about feelings and higher states of mind are just diversions to keep us occupied when we are disengaged from the wilderness.

In the end she finally reveals the source of her depression. Her family was killed in a mass shooting event. I suppose somebody thought giving that reason would do something - feed the controversy maybe? I mean movies thrive on controversy, so I don't really blame them for that. It was kind of tacked on, but it give us some closure, it didn't leave us hanging. It doesn't matter. In reality, severe depression can be caused by nothing at all, or just by being a round peg being pushed in the square hole that society has made for you. Christ, big corporations suck. Some people might be able to survive there, but not me.

Robin Wright was great as Kevin Spacey's spouse in House of Cards, one of the best and most cynical shows about American politics. Another reference to House of Cards here.