Mendelsohn gets to inhabit yet another character whose moral compass is cracked in The Land of Steady Habits, with this particular role being that of Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn), a middle-aged guy who, in an attempt to find fulfillment, recently quit his job, divorced his wife and set off for retirement. The story begins a few months into this new quest for self-satisfaction and things are not going great, at all. Hill is caught between wanting to get back into his old life and actually taking the steps necessary to begin a whole new chapter of his own existence. His 27-year-old son, Preston (Thomas Mann), is facing similar struggles on where to go with his life as he struggles to maintain a job and keep his personal demons in check.
The premise of The Land of Steady Habits, which is written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, maintains a quiet atmosphere while also probing the surprisingly complex nature of its lead characters struggles, particularly the difficulty Anders faces with realizing the ripple effects of his consequences. He runs away from recognizing how his actions would affect others and constantly tries to shift blame off of himself, in essence putting himself into a constant cycle of bad decisionmaking that he's never able to learn from. Holofcener depicts this troublesome behavior in subtle ways that Mendelsohn excels with as a performer, I especially like how both Holofcener's writing and Mendelsohn's acting portray how Anders ties himself into verbal knots to try to avoid taking responsibility for any prior transgressions.
Perhaps most interestingly in how The Land of Steady Habits depicts Anders as a broken person is in how it depicts the relationship formed between Anders and troubled teenage addict Charlie (Charlie Tahan), with the two of them sharing conversations about life while Charlie evades his parents who want to send him away to rehab. What at first seems like a retread of the relationship between Kevin Spacey and Wes Bentley in American Beauty quietly upends expectations by making it clear that Anders just indulging in Charlie's company like this, and thus helping Charlie to avoid getting help he desperately needs, isn't a good thing at all, it's just another way Anders behaves selfishly at the expense of other people.
The Land of Steady Habits has a nice habit of making the various individuals in Charlie's life feel like fully-formed people, thus allowing someone like Charlie to actually get to be a fully-realized character too instead of just a device to make a point about how far gone the character of Anders is. Ditto for Preston, whose complex relationship with his father defies easy categorization and feels like it was torn straight out of real life itself. Holofcener has a sharp eye for replicating the complex ways human beings affect one another in her writing and in how she directs her actors, though her visual scheme here sometimes leaves something to be desired. Too many of the conversations in The Land of Steady Habits are rendered in a "medium shot/reverse medium shot" format that far too often isolates the actors from one another, I was desperately wanting these rich performances to share the frame more often so that we could see them explicitly interact more often.
More egregiously, the otherwise pretty good screenplay by Holofcener drops the ball in its last five minutes with a clumsy climax that undermines the perspective of the characters of Charlie's parents and wraps things up too tidily for characters like Anders and Preston. The best parts of The Land of Steady Habits are all about the messiness of real-life and how one's actions can have ripple effects for months afterward, so such a clean-cut ending felt like putting a cherry on top of an apple pie, it's a finishing touch that doesn't belong. But prior to that at least The Land of Steady Habits does prove to be a compelling drama that, if nothing else, offers up a great lead performance by the quietly versatile Ben Mendelsohn.
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