Longtime readers of this blog know how much of a Nicole Holofcener fan I am. The sublime indie writer-director is known for taking long gaps between her films, and while this still holds true, she's actually been quite active since the release of her previous feature, 2013's excellent Enough Said. In the time since then, she's had a number of jobs directing episodes of TV shows like Togetherness, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Orange is the New Black, while also penning the scripts for 2014's Every Secret Thing and this month's Can You Ever Forgive Me? But the only way to experience the full power of Holofcener's prowess is through a project where she's responsible for the writing and directing, and in that sense, her newest film, The Land of Steady Habits is her first mainline film in five years. For a superfan like myself this was an absolute event, and I treated it as such, watching it shortly after it premiered on Netflix last month.
After making her name as one of the most observant and thoughtful filmmakers when it comes to the inner and outer lives of women, she tries her hand this time around at a male protagonist. (Perhaps an even bigger shock is the fact that this is her first feature film without longtime collaborator Catherine Keener.) Based on a book by the same name, the film follows Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who finds himself restless after the twin major events of his recent divorce and an early retirement from his soul-crushing job in finance. On its journey to find Anders' true north, the story ends up being slightly more incident-heavy and darker than what we're used to from Holofcener. So Steady Habits clearly finds Holofcener pushing herself out of her comfort zone in small ways.
But while giving us a slightly new taste, the film still ends up feeling like classic Holofcener on a bone-deep level. It's imbued with her usual sense of grace and wit, gliding along in its 98 minutes full of relaxed, true-to-life banter that hits the right balance of quotidian and insightful. Her characters are always slightly brittle, uneasy folks that you somehow feel an incredible amount of warmth for and it's no different here. Anders is another character in the Holofcener tradition, a man who is acting out of a surface frustration and dissatisfaction without fully grasping the true thing that's gnawing at him. In a few bits of economical exposition, we learn that he retired from his job because, as he describes, it was very demanding and morally unjust. You get the sense that it was a move he made because it would be the thing that finally made him happy. But shortly after that, he decided to leave his wife Helene (Edie Falco) as well. And that's where we arrive at his story, no more content or whole than he was before he blew his life up. The whole movie is him trying to remedy the wrong ailment, not realizing that his entire sense of unease is driven by the fact that he has the rest of his life in his windshield and no idea what to do with it.
That ennui is the driving force for what is another theme that fans of Nicole Holofcener will know very well. One of the most poignant threads of her previous film Enough Said was the B-plot between main character Eva (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her daughter's best friend, Chloe (Tavi Gevinson). It's the summer before Eva's daughter goes away to college, and she finds herself getting attached to Chloe, who will still be around when fall starts. It's a small, unspoken little throughline that never fully gets verbalized or confronted, but it's very clear that Eva's actions are a way of working through her anxiety that her daughter will soon be moving far away, leaving her all alone.
In a similar way, Steady Habits has Anders form a bond with Charlie (Charlie Tahan), the son of his ex-wife's best friends. The two first encounter each other in the film at a party thrown by Charlie's parents that Anders crashes. When Anders wanders outside, he happens upon Charlie with his friends smoking a bong, and Anders' mid-life crisis-induced odd decision-making leads him to join them, where he learns that the marijuana is laced with PCP once he smokes it. Charlie overdoses later in the night and must be taken to the hospital -- just another chapter in his apparent battle with drugs. The wayward relationship between Anders and Charlie ends up forming much of the skeleton of the film's back half. Not only is it a situation that gives us further evidence of how adrift Anders feels in his life, it takes on even more significance when viewed alongside his relationship with his own son, Preston (Thomas Mann). See, Preston has his own issues with addiction -- a past stint in rehab gets mentioned a few times in conversation -- and his life isn't exactly in order, as he's chosen to loaf around after graduating college. Anders has a decent enough relationship with his son, yet he seems to inadvertently spend so much time with Charlie.
Is Anders drawn to Charlie because he sees Preston in him? Is it a way to not actually deal with his own son's problem? Is he grasping on to any thread from his previous life, however tenuous? Does Anders even know why he does what he does? It's a series of questions that Steady Habits asks the audience to ponder, and that mystery is what makes him such a compelling protagonist.
What makes the film so special is that it's not wholly Anders' story though. Holofcener has a way of distributing her narratives in a generous fashion, spreading them out wide enough to touch a myriad of supporting characters and their lives. Some critics, like Indiewire's David Ehrlich, took issue with the way she seems to have her attention on so many different threads in this one, but I love the way that every character and subplot add to the general idea that the film is trying to express. It's a story about the life unlived, ruminating on everything from what parents and children owe each other to whether it's worthwhile to steer your existence in another direction when you've already spent so much of it going one way, and every new branch that explores those themes just deepens the roots of Anders' struggles.
In previous works like Please Give and Walking and Talking, Holofcener has favored happier endings for her characters. They go through their trials, but they tend to come away from those situations with a better understanding of themselves, their place in the world, and how they relate to those they love the most. The Land of Steady Habits, then, is a bold turn in that regard. Charlie dies of another overdose towards the end of the film and is found by Preston alone in the woods, a grim flash for the latter of what could've happened if a few things went differently in his own life. And everything comes to a head at a dinner between the two families, where Charlie's parents learn that Anders was the last person to see Charlie, and that he let Charlie run off instead of calling to inform them that he had broken out of the hospital. It's a bleak climax, one that's made all the more fascinating because what follows is pretty ambiguous in regards to Anders' growth as a person. Months pass and everyone attempts to move on with their lives, with Anders continuing to date the woman he met earlier in the film (played by the great Connie Britton) while also looking after the turtle Charlie left him. Holofcener loves a symbolic token, and the turtle is just another one in a long line of them. Instead of leaving Anders with a lesson learned, it presents him with a more difficult task, the choice to learn a lesson from everything that just happened to him.
This is a film that doesn't seem to have landed with too many critics out there. Nicole Holofcener isn't exactly a widely celebrated filmmaker, but she has certainly carved out a niche for fans, and even many of those people consider her latest to be a minor misstep. However, the film and its ending in particular walloped me. The Lands of Steady Habits sits right alongside the rest of her sterling filmography; it's another work that gives us a view of her considerable ability to sketch out the lives and psychologies of characters in simple, fluid strokes. And in its small storytelling risks, it points toward exciting new avenues for her to explore as a filmmaker. Hopefully this won't be the last time Netflix provides her with money to do her thing. There aren't many others out there who can make a specific gem like this.
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