The United States of Leland Review

Matthew Ryan Hoge builds his film around a killing he refuses to explain, then spends most of its length explaining it anyway, in a voiceover that mistakes flat affect for depth. Gosling plays Leland as a boy gone soft and quiet at the center, and in stretches that works: the small smile he gives Don Cheadle's prison teacher when he senses he is being studied, the blank patience with which he answers questions about stabbing a disabled child he has known for years.

Cheadle is the other good thing, playing a man whose interest in his student curdles into raw material for a book. Around those two the movie stacks its cast badly. Kevin Spacey turns up as a famous novelist and recites paragraphs of aphorism. Jena Malone and Michelle Williams are handed addiction and grief as costume. The script's central claim, that ordinary sadness is everywhere and that noticing it is a kind of curse, gets said aloud so often it stops carrying meaning.

The photography is grey and unfussy, which is the right instinct, but nothing in the frame argues with the narration. Even the one passage with real force, Leland describing the afternoon of the killing in a voice drained of everything, gets reprised later, as if Hoge did not trust anyone to have heard it.