Though every destination and person contains a beauty Maltz is delicately attuned to, it is Gladstone who emerges once more as a driving force like no other. Be it in a diner or a motel, the film slows down to reflect on the people that most other works would merely relegate to the background. That is, except when we hear small interviews with those she meets. With that weighing on her as she drives her grandmother’s Cadillac, we spend the film almost entirely with her from the moment she wakes up before the city has only just begun to come alive through her discovering a poetic personal purpose to her travels. The moment of celebration coming so close after a loss while Tana is still in mourning is further complicated by the fact that she hasn’t been back home in some time.
Devastated by her death, she hits the road to travel from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota after getting an invitation to her cousin’s wedding.
She has just lost her grandmother who she had been caring for up until the very end. Eschewing more conventional storytelling elements to instead embrace the feeling of roaming the world after everything you have known has been upended, it is a film about the modern American West and all the people that make it home.Īt the core of this is Gladstone’s Tana. An understated yet no less arresting road drama that is interwoven with some documentary elements, it is a work that is overflowing with a subtle authenticity that grows on you until laying you flat. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.What makes a film or, for that matter, a life? Is it the heavy moments of tragedy that we carry with us? The small joys that are sprinkled throughout that keep us going? In writer-director Morrisa Maltz’s feature debut The Unknown Country, starring Lily Gladstone of the highly anticipated upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon from Martin Scorsese and Erica Tremblay’s sublime drama Fancy Dance, these are the fundamental questions of legacy that are swirling around. This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
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