It’s become a depressingly familiar rite of passage for a director of vim and promise to stumble when they ambitiously decide to adapt a book that should have probably stayed on the shelf. Back in 2018, Blue Ruin and Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier came a cropper when he tried to wrangle William Giraldi’s unwieldy Hold the Dark to the screen. At Sundance in 2020, Dee Rees followed Pariah and Mudbound with a clunky, critically loathed attempt to turn Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted into a coherent film. And just last year Andrew Dominik and Noah Baumbach made their worst films to date with Blonde and White Noise respectively.
A strong attachment to the source material can of course be a good thing, a passion that can be clearly felt on screen, but it can also cloud one’s vision resulting in a messy, no-notes-taken blank cheque project that can often affect what cheques might follow. The latest victim is Cory Finley, who at the intimidatingly young age of 32, has already made two festival hits: dark teen comedy Thoroughbreds and knotty true crime drama Bad Education, featuring a never-better Hugh Jackman. But his third film is a bafflingly botched misfire, a frustratingly off-key adaptation of MT Anderson’s 2017 novel Landscape with Invisible Hand. What makes it that much more frustrating is that it’s not made without visible skill and there are some moving parts that are close to fully working but those that don’t quickly outnumber, a film that gets harder to defend with every scene.
