Dir. Kelly Reichardt
1845. On the Oregon trail
westward, two families are on a pilgrimage across the untamed American
landscape to a new civilisation. They follow the advice of a bold stranger
Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who
guides them across the trail only for it to become clear that they are lost
with dwindling amounts of water and food available to survive. When they
encounter a lone Native American, the
families against Meek's desires use him as a new guide. But their relationships
are breaking down, they have no idea if there are any more Native Americans in
the desert around them, creating paranoia, and they don't know if they'll reach
anything.
The film has promise. A female
director taking on a typically masculine genre in the western. Three core
female characters - Michelle Williams,
Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan - Williams the most distinct if just for the fact that she is willing
to lift up a rifle with intent. Stripped of the tropes of the genre in favour
of a minimalist drama. It baffles at first, but the beginning half suggest
something special. Very minimalistic. Little dialogue. Stunning shots of
western frontier desert, barren but evoking. Reichardt name checks Nanook
of the North (1922), one of the first momentous documentaries in cinema's
history, and the first half consists of the actors working on everyday tasks as
they travel, promising a journey which draws you into a trance-like tone of
these activities against the participants asking each other if they will ever
get to their goal or die. Moments in the first part visually almost become
abstract, mistaking the core cast far away as mirages or ghosts.
When the Native American
character is introduced and the film becomes more dynamic in story, it sadly
becomes a bad drama. I suspect Meek's
Cutoff would still be as flimsy on another viewing. It has no tension with
what will happen to the characters, their potential deaths or paranoia of
Native Americans attacking them in the night never having a sense of real fear
or suffocation. The visual potency of the landscape is dropped in favour of a
lacking narrative where it feels its cast - including Paul Dano - are just going off a story that feels lifeless. It
never feels like the viewer should concern themselves with the group falling to
pieces, and both the mundanely of doing tasks and the potential feminist tone
are not used at all by its final. Worse is its attempt at being profound. The setting
evokes the concepts of "Manifest Destiny", conquering land presumed
to be there for white colonists, but never feels like a fully evocative look at
it. It's too slight for it to tackle the historical issues of the time subtly,
and the scenes with monologues, like Meek saying women are chaos and men are
destruction, feel useless attempts at profundity within the structure around
them to be significant and linger in your thoughts. The ending is anti-climatic
in a terrible way, finishing abruptly. It was support to, clearly, leave the
viewer thinking, but for me felt like an ending wasn't written at all. By the
end of Meek's Cutoff, there is
nothing said in it of worth, of mood, historical analysis, even a good drama.
Its actors in period garb in a film
which squanders it promise. Neither does it dissect the western in a profound
way like an actual western film could.
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