Meek’s Cut-off. Written by Jonathan Raymond. Directed by Kelly Reichardt.
I looked forward to Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff with a fair amount of anticipation. Based on previews, this modernist Western looked like a throwback to such classics of foreboding as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock—in short, the kind of textured, intensely visual, pensive work that makes folks today yawn and reach for their smart phones. Something, anything to remind us that movies started as a pictorial medium, before the sound and fury and chatter of most fare today, Hollywood and independent.
At least at first, Reichardt delivers the goods. The story of three families trekking west along the Oregon Trail in 1845, Meek’s Cutoff (“cutoff” as in “short cut”) is visualized with a novelist’s care and affection for its subject. As the party’s wagons crawl through an endless, desolate landscape, women in suffocating frocks and bonnets trudge, collecting firewood and warding off boredom and—at times—their sense of futility. Along with the splendid cinematography by Chris Blauvelt, the sound design by Leslie Shatz gives us a feel for the awesome space such journeys challenged, punctuated only by the homely sounds of a squeaky wheel or a hanging pot endlessly clanking against a post. If we experience this film’s vistas and silences as witnesses, not as consumers impatient to be entertained, they do evoke a time and a place (and an indomitable kind of individual) we can hardly imagine today. After all, Reichardt’s pioneer women are the contemporaries of the Brontes on their moors five thousand miles away—except that the ghosts they face are alien ones, and the question of love seems very remote indeed.
Unfortunately, at some point the question of story does tend to assert itself. Meek (Bruce Greenwood) is the grizzled braggart hired by the families to guide them west. The Tetherows (Michelle Williams and Will Patton) are getting the sense that Meek either doesn’t know what he’s doing, or is deliberately leading them to disaster. As the families bicker over the next move, their guide terrifies them with stories of Indian massacres, though it is never quite clear whether he knows what he’s talking about or is just making himself seem more indispensable. Before long a lone Indian (Rod Rondeaux) is captured lurking nearby. Meek wants to shoot him, but the Tetherows trust he will show them the way to the water they desperately need. Will he? If the Indian is saying, it’s only in his own inscrutable language, which Meek professes not to understand.
Trouble is, neither Reichardt nor screenwriter John Raymond seem to know either. Is it a spoiler to say that a spoiler isn’t possible here, because the movie doesn’t end, it just stops? Indeed, a similar case of cinema interruptus marred Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008). When the lights came up at my screening, an audible groan came up from the crowd. Reichardt shows a lot of good instincts here, from the way she plays upon and undermines our clichés about “how the West was won”, and her casting of the remarkable Michelle Williams, who looks very much her part. But by presenting a movie entitled “Cutoff” as literally cut off, Reichardt just seems to be playing a cruel joke on her audience.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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