Though it ultimately stumbles, Tom Gilroy’s “The Cold Lands” begins a promising observance of the intricate forces capable of driving mothers and sons apart. The always-welcome Lili Taylor plays Nicole, single mother of Atticus (Silas Yelich), an eleven year old boy with brown whelp-eyes. Nicole’s untreated diabetes is making it difficult for the watchful minimalist to ward off the vulture-like presence of Mrs. Lockwood, some sort of family services gal who annoys the bejesus out of Nicole. Mrs. Lockwood likes to rattle on the door of Nicole’s off-the-grid home in the Catskills and “check in” on the mother’s health while simultaneously handing her a platter of frosting drenched cupcakes. Atticus dubs the treats “White Death” before his mother tells him to chuck ‘em with the compost---they don’t need that nosy, state-sponsored-aunt telling Nicole that she can always offer Atticus a room at her house if Nicole, a ghost-shift custodian, can’t attend to him, just like they don’t need that free eighties television set Atticus eyes on the side of the road. Well, she and Atticus certainly need help (and bless Atticus for sneaking a cupcake), but we don’t exactly blame Nicole for shewing Mrs. Lockwood away. Nicole is a woman with everything to lose, and how tightly yet calmly she holds onto her doctrines is as stealthy as her nighttime tick-inspection of a slumbering Atticus.
Beyond the foe of “The State,” the pacifist must also recognize her son’s reasonable pull towards not only modern day trappings, but aggression. While Atticus can rack up hours wading in the weedy pond out back, the pass time isn’t enough to overturn puberty’s flurries of testosterone. A small garden snake that Atticus encounters learns this the hard way. Yet the boy also respects his mother, and Gilroy playfully illustrates the compromises the two make with one another: Atticus prepares for a friend’s birthday sleepover, and while no, an already worried Nicole won’t buy that shocking soldiers-with-snipers video game, she supposes that marginally less violent brain-eating zombies fare won’t be a totally corrosive present. The pair pick their battles with each other, and from that, a small, nice tension sprouts.
Then, too early on, Nicole dies and that tension is hacked off from the movie like a dead limb. A scared Atticus goes full Survivor Boy, fleeing into the woods and crossing paths with gypsy man and pseudo big brother, Carter (the terrific Peter Scanavino). Their bond picks up the pace, but the movie feels stunted without its maternal underpinning. If only Gilroy had followed the lead of his gorgeous and upsetting opener, in which we jitter by watching a peacock jitter from the not-too-distant barks of unseen hounds. The complex triangulation between us, the hunted, and the hunters foreshadows what should be an even more complex triangulation between us, Nicole and Atticus, and the realities threatening their status quo. Unfortunately, like Nicole, the narrative focus born from this tight little sequence doesn’t come out of “The Cold Lands” alive.
