Meek's Cutoff (2010) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Western

Meek's Cutoff, from acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy And Lucy, Old Joy), is a stark and poetic drama set in 1845, the earliest days of the treacherous Oregon Trail. A wagon train of three families (including two-time Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams) has hired mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a shortcut, Meek leads the group to an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst, and their own lack of faith in each other's instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as their natural enemy.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on September 26, 2011 -- Last year, with my wife in the passenger seat and our cat in a carrier perched on a stack of boxes in the back, I drove from western Maryland to Seattle in four days, which averages out to about 675 miles per day. The greatest inconvenience we experienced—besides the cat's incessant meowing, which we eventually remedied by drugging her up with Benadryl—was getting stuck in Laramie, Wyoming, when a snowstorm temporarily shut down the highway heading west. We pulled into the only place that seemed to be open, a kind of mom-and-pop taxidermy museum/leatherworks shop, where we spent the next four hours chatting up the friendly owners, reading, and browsing the internet on our laptops while the cat kept warm on a graciously donated piece of sheepskin. The snow cleared, we grabbed a Thai lunch, and we were in Boise by nightfall. Some hardship. We never had to ford a river or scavenge for food. We didn't have to worry about getting attacked by a hostile tribe or running out of water. No one died of dysentery or contracted cholera. The wild, wild west has been thoroughly tamed, crisscrossed with freeways and dotted with hotels and convenience stores.

In comparison, the three families heading westward in Meek's Cutoff have it almost unfathomably rough. It's 1845, their mode of transport is covered wagons pulled by sickly-looking steer, and they're lucky if they make it ten miles on any given day. There are no conveniences, no assurances of making it to their destination, or even of surviving at all. At its most literal, the film is a reminder of how hard life was for America's pioneers. Meek's Cutoff was directed by indie minimalist Kelly Reichardt, whose previous two features, Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy, are also road movie travelogues of a sort, the former about a woman whose car breaks down in Oregon on her way to Alaska, and the latter about two old friends who find themselves while trying to find an elusive hot spring in the Cascades.

Reichardt returns to the Pacific Northwest here—the film is set in the High Desert of eastern Oregon, the final stretch of the Oregon Trail—but takes us back 160-some years, to an era when the concern for sheer survival left little time for psychological introspection. Meek's Cutoff might loosely be called a "western," but only in the sense that it takes place in the old west. Otherwise, it's not at all what you'd expect from a genre known for gunslingers, Indian ambushes, and moral certitude. The easiest way I can think to describe it is as an arthouse survival story with a subtext about American imperialism, a feminist undertone of male-pattern cluelessness, and a scope and pacing that suggest the rhythms and intimate grandeur of biblical fable.

In fact, the first words we clearly hear spoken in the film are from a young boy reading aloud the Genesis story of Adam and Eve's banishment from the garden, and the bit about man being cursed to toil over the land for his food seems immediately apropos considering the utter barrenness surrounding these travelers, who are heading for what they hope will be "a regular second Eden." The boy is the son of William and Glory White (Neal Huff and Shirley Henderson), a faithful couple hoping to find financial redemption in the western territories. They're joined by Thomas Gately (Paul Dano) and his flighty wife, Millie (Zoe Kazan)—whose naiveté about the hardships ahead is suggested in the fact that she brings along a tiny songbird in a dainty cage—as well as widower Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton) and his new bride Emily (Michelle Williams), who talk in hushed tones about the intentions of Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), their hired guide. Meek is a bearded and stringy-haired mountain-man who tells tale tales and claims to have been roving these lands for the past twenty years. His abilities as a guide, however, seem increasingly suspect. What he promised was a short cut has become a directionless slog through the desert wilderness. We know everything we need to know when we see Mr. Gately with a knife, scrawling the word "LOST" onto a sun-bleached fallen tree trunk. The water supply is dwindling. The steer are growing tired. The families begin leaving behind unneeded supplies to lighten the load.

The film is largely quiet and experiential, as Reichardt dwells on the harsh realities of such a journey: the tedium of trudging all day under the hot sun, the bickering between the men over which way to go—the women watch stoically from a distance as all the key decisions are being sussed out by their ineffectual husbands—and the desperate hope for water over the next hill. Reichardt's editing is simple, with a preponderance for shots that last a minute or more, and there are few close-ups. Instead, with wide angles we see the characters in the context of their stunning but bleak surroundings. At the same time, the director has made a deliberate choice to shoot the film in the old Academy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, a roughly square frame that's a stark contrast to the widescreen Technicolor 2.35:1 vistas we've come to expect from westerns. It has the effect of boxing in the characters, caging them like Millie's bird. They're in the middle of an endlessly wide-open landscape, but they're constrained. Reichhardt has stated that the constricted framing is essentially a mirroring of the way women of that time period would see the world through their narrow sun-bonnets, their peripheral vision completely removed. It also seems to echo the "eye on the prize" tunnel-vision mentality of Manifest Destiny, the belief that westward expansion was a God-given mandate to America. Anything that lay in the periphery—the Native Americans, say, or the environment—was ignored.

The film's dramatic crux comes when the pioneers capture a Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux) who's been following them. They face a dilemma; do they kill him immediately—as Meek nearly jumps to suggest—or do they try to barter with him and have him lead them to water? Can they put their faith in someone they've been pre-programmed to fear and hate? Michelle Williams' Emily, who is perhaps the closest the film comes to a "lead" character, opts to trust him, as it becomes clear that Meek is leading them nowhere. But no one gets all Dances with Wolves buddy- buddy with the captive, with whom communication is practically impossible thanks to an unbridgeable language and culture gap. He's merely their begrudging hope-of-last-resort. When Emily darns his falling-apart moccasin, she does so not out of kindness, but because, as she puts it, "I want him to owe me something." She's a strong character—clear-eyed and decisive when the men are either falsely optimistic, like her husband, or full of Grade-A bullshit, like Meek—and Williams' plays her with a steely-gazed subtlety.

Unavoidably, Meek's Cutoff will be deemed boring by those who expect a traditional western—there are no shootouts, hold-ups, or heists here—but for more patient viewers, the tumbleweed pace will nurture contemplation about the hardships of the old west, the place of women in American expansionism, and the mistreatment of the natives who were here long before wagons ever rolled across the plains. While the film stretches too far in its final scene for an ending that's ambiguous and philosophically loaded, what comes before is striking in its solemn realism.

If you've seen and enjoyed Kelly Reichardt's previous films—Old Joy or Wendy and Lucy—then you'll have a head start on understanding and appreciating Meek's Cutoff, a slow-paced survival story that trades the black-and-white simplicity of most westerns for feminism-tinted moral and historical complexity. Understandably, it isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for something more challenging and evocative than your average shoot-em-up, Meek's Cutoff is well worth checking out. It looks fantastic on Blu-ray, and comes in Oscilloscope's beautiful recycled cardboard packaging. Recommended!

User Comment: *** This review may contain spoilers *** BoomerMovieFan1 from Atlanta, Georgia, 18 May 2011 • This movie is much loved by the critics, but you know there is some kind of problem when the critics meter on RottenTomatoes.com stands at 87 while the audience meter is at 65. Personally, I don't think it's a bad movie, but before you decide to see it, you at least need to know that:

--It is a very minimalist movie, even more so than Somewhere (which I loved). You don't even get a good look at the actors' faces until 15 minutes or so into the movie. The dialog is so sparse that the actors probably didn't need to start studying the script until the night before shooting began. (Don't be fooled by the trailer--it contains most of the dialog in the movie.) The screen is almost completely black in the many barely illuminated night scenes. You can hear the dialog, but you can't see much of their faces or see what they are doing. Although these scenes are highly realistic, the director seems to have forgotten that film is a visual medium. And too much of the dialog is unintelligible. I couldn't decide whether the problem was poor enunciation by the actors, poor placement of the microphones, or both.

--This is one of those "make up your own ending" movies. After you spend 104 minutes watching these people trek through a parched landscape looking for water, you long for answers. The dramatic tension in the movie arises primarily from not knowing whether the Indian they have captured will lead them to water or into a fatal ambush. But don't expect any clear-cut resolution. Yes, there are clues at the end. But some viewers will be unhappy to discover that there is no unambiguous answer to the central question of the movie.

With that said, I still think Meek's Cutoff is worth seeing because it gives you a good feel for what life was like in a wagon train. The film is not so much a drama as a reenactment of life on the trail. No matter that the dialog is sparse. No matter that there is no real ending. The director isn't much interested in character development or storyline anyway. She just wants to put you in the shoes of these pioneers for a few days. And on this level, the movie works very well. Although it may not be entertaining (after all, life on the trail was boring most of the time), it is informative.

Summary: The least you need to know.

[CSW] -3.1- The guide Meek, that promised then a shortcut but then got them lost seems to be a nasty racist character. I think he is portrayed as that to heighten the drama and to keep the audience focused on the settlers and their predicament. The real story is the portrayal of a resourceful and strong-willed woman who even when the group loses their way and risk losing a grip on themselves move them a direction that is the most likely to succeed. Do they succeed? That that question is delivered in an open-ended manner sure to frustrate general audiences. The hardships were greater and the characters slightly different in the real story. They actually endured things like those shown many, many times & much worse. Many people died. So if you're frustrated by the ending -- read the book. But enjoy the movie first, I did.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

º º