The western has been around at least as long as movies have, so it's fitting that it's been revised, it seems, more than any other genre. Gone are the black and white hats of John Ford, symbols of moral certainty. But also gone are the gray hats of Leone and Peckinpah, amoral anti-heroes (who are still quite alive in action movies). The western, as a western, continues to evolve.
Meek's Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, strips another layer off, showing the frontier as a place where all certainty, not just morality, is lost on the trail. In that sense it has more in common with quest-visions like Jarmusch's Dead Man or Herzog's Aguirre than it does with The Searchers or The Wild Bunch.
Ambiguity rules in Meek's Cutoff, something which moviegoers are notoriously iffy about. Granted, it's not for everyone. The plot is linear, with little buildup and no release. The score seems straight out of a Kubrick film (thankfully it's used sparingly.) The characters say little, but what they do say is usually meaningless or a lie, and either way it doesn't much matter.
Even the purpose of the movie is ambiguous. It isn't simply playing with genre, something we all should be used to (and bored of) by now. Images go by, often without comment, that seem to have great importance: a drawing on a rock, an empty bird cage, a passage read aloud from the bible, a strange tree. But an obvious meaning doesn't leap out. The possibilities creep on you, unexpectedly, as if this was a movie designed not to be watched but rewatched. That alone is reason to see Meek's Cutoff. Like it or not, it makes you think.
The plot follows loosely the real story of the Meek Cutoff, a stretch of the Oregon trail blazed by the questionable frontiersman Stephen Meek, notable mostly for being a disaster. In 1845 Meek led a train of settlers off the beaten path and into the mountains in search of a faster way across Oregon. The settlers soon began to suspect Meek had no idea where he was going, water quickly ran out, and many died.
In this film the wagon train is pared down to just three families and three wagons, all following Bruce Greenwood's crude, cruel Stephen Meek. Greenwood plays Meek somewhere between Rooster Cogburn and Yosemite Sam, patently unlikable, loud, boastful, but not quite evil. He's also given the best speeches, including one about the differences between men and women which may or may not be completely accurate, depending on how you interpret the movie.
The de facto head of the team is Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton, hilariously typecast), who is traveling with his wife Emily (a feisty Michelle Williams). Solomon is a stereotypical western character, the "strong, silent type," who plies his young bride with words of confidence in the face of adversity. The first clue this isn't a typical western happens when Emily refuses to accept his platitudes. Women in westerns are supposed to understand when their husbands are putting on a strong front, even when they don't believe them. It's not like they have a say in the matter anyway.
The whole movie really is shown mostly from the point of view of the women on the trail. There are no sweeping panoramas here: Reichardt has shrunk the frame to a claustrophobic 4:3, giving us a compressed, forward-facing landscape, confined on all sides not unlike the ridiculous bonnets the women of the time were stuck wearing. Most of the talking and decision-making goes on either off-camera or at a distance, with the women dutifully watching, washing clothes or knitting, hearing bits of dialogue but not enough to matter.
The women deal with them and their steadily-increasing troubles in different ways, with patience or hysterics or a growing toughness. Further division comes with the arrival of a Native American, who might bring either doom or salvation. The blustering Meek wants to kill him, the quiet Solomon wants to follow him, no one knows what to believe. Meek and Emily have been slated for a confrontation since the beginning, if only because neither of them seem able to fit in each other's world views. The Native American gives them an excuse.
In a way, they're all lost. They're all desperate, the men and the women, the Native American too, tired and thirsty and uncertain about the future. Maybe that's the biggest lesson of the frontier, and the women get it first. And they do get to have a say in the end in a way, but by then it seems to not matter.
The ending itself is sure to be a source of contention. You're bound to either be pissed off by it, or pissed off by it initially, then, as the credits roll and you start thinking more, at least intrigued. Then you might want to watch it again.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Sadly, not enough. Most interesting is a short essay by Richard Hell printed on the inside of the box, which provides a little context. Hell places the movie firmly in the school of Brechtian “alienation,” which is either selling it too short or too long. The movie, according to Hell, “respects the viewer by providing a genuine search into reality, rather than an escape from it.”
There is also a short making-of featurette which is nearly as sparse and uninformative as the movie.
"Meek's Cutoff" is on sale September 13, 2011 and is rated PG. Drama, Indie, Western. Directed by K Asher Levin, Kelly Reichardt. Written by Jonathan Raymond. Starring Bruce Greenwood, Michelle Williams, Will Patton.
